Depth Charge

by Jason Heaton

  Sebastian opened a large black Pelican case in the bottom of the boat and carefully lifted out the limpet mine, a Russian made Ulitka model, that Fonseka had gotten from the naval base’s armory for Tusker the night before. Sebastian handed the unwieldy device to Tusker, who clipped it to two D-rings on his harness with carabiners. The skiff listed dangerously to one side as he sat on the gunwale. Sam and Sebastian countered it by hiking out opposite him.

  “I’ll splash in and wait for you, Sam,” Tusker said. He spat in his mask, wiped and rinsed it, strapped it over his hood, and tumbled into the water. The splash sounded loud. Sebastian looked warily at the black silhouette of the Depth Charge in the distance. Sam quickly shouldered her single cylinder and rolled off the other side of the boat. Sebastian handed the deco cylinders over the side to her, one by one, and she clipped them to her own harness.

  Tusker was bobbing alongside the skiff, holding himself away with a hand on its hull. Sam swam around to him. They looked into each other’s eyes in the gloom. Tusker wanted to say something meaningful to her. This would be the last time they’d speak until after he would surface. If he would surface. But before he could open his mouth, Sebastian leaned over the side and whispered loudly to them.

  “Get going!” he hissed. “Samanthi, I’ll look out for you when you surface. Julian, we’ll motor in just offshore and keep an eye out for your signal when you surface in a few hours. Remember, three pulses with your torch towards shore every 60 seconds.”

  Tusker nodded and clamped his mouthpiece between his teeth. He swiveled around towards the open sea and held up his wrist compass. Aligning the bezel so that North was on the swinging needle, he took a bearing on the approximate position of the Depth Charge. 50 degrees, give or take. If he could get close, he’d know when the big ship was above him. He caught Sam’s eyes and gave her a wink. Then, a thumbs-down gesture. Time to go under and swim.

  Tusker and Sam vented air from their buoyancy wings and their heads disappeared under the inky surface. He felt her hand on his arm. He switched on his torch and quickly held it tight against his compass and then his watch for a few seconds, then turned it off. The compass and watch dials glowed brightly, their luminescent markings excited from the burst of LED light. Then, with his left arm held at a right angle in front of him, he swam on the 50-degree bearing with slow, deliberate kicks. At this shallow depth, it was difficult going, and the swells pushed him and Sam up and down, their backs almost breaking the surface. The heavy mine attached to Tusker’s chest made swimming awkward.

  They swam in unison, Sam’s hand held lightly on Tusker’s arm. In the pitch black, Tusker felt an eerie sense of disembodiment. Sam’s light touch through the neoprene provided a small measure of comfort. He remembered her fingers on his skin in that dark room back in Pottuvil and wished they were there now. Tusker only took his eyes off of the compass to check the time on his watch, counting off his swim distance. He could swim about 100 yards in ten minutes. They must be getting close to the ship.

  Sure enough, ahead he could sense something big in the water, a change in the sound: A low murmuring and a slapping of water, the hum of the ship’s dynamic positioning system thrusters. At their shallow depth, if they got too close, they would swim right into the ship. A slight glow emanated down into the water column, light leaking through the moon pool, no doubt. It was time for Sam to leave him.

  Tusker stopped swimming and turned to face her in the dark water, being careful to stay below the surface. They’d gone over the tank handoff several times. She’d have the 100 percent O2 clipped on her right side. “Rich on the right,” he remembered from his old tech diving instructor in Michigan. He reached out and, with his fingers, found the double-ended dog clip on her harness and unclipped it, being careful not to lose his grip. One mistake here—a dropped tank, a mixup of the two deco bottles—and they’d have to abort, or worse, he would die breathing the wrong gas at the wrong depth. He transferred the oxygen cylinder to his own right side and clipped it to the D-rings on his shoulder strap and hip belt. Then he did the same with the 50 percent nitrox tank, moving it from Sam’s left to his own. The transfer of weight caused him to sink in the water and Sam to rise, but they’d accounted for this and she deflated her own wing while he moved the tanks. He momentarily gripped her on both forearms and squeezed a goodbye, hoping the gesture would convey all he wanted to say. She squeezed back. Then she was gone.

  Tusker turned back to face the ship that loomed in front of him, invisible in the water. The other invisible ship, the HMAS Vampire, would be directly below him now, 350 feet down. Sebastian had pumped up the little 15-cubic-foot travel bottle as much as he could, but Tusker had breathed off of it for the ten-minute swim and needed it for the descent as well. He would discard it when he got to the wreck. There was no time to waste. He deflated his wing and sank like a stone, equalizing his ears every few feet. After three minutes, he quickly switched mouthpieces. He was now breathing off of his precious bottom gas mix. The clock was ticking.

  Without an anchor line, and in complete darkness, he had no sense of where he would touch bottom. A few feet off and he’d descend right over the lip of the trench and keep going into 2,000 feet of water. He blindly fumbled for the backlight button on his dive computer and pressed it. The display showed 300 feet and dropping. He had to be getting close. Would he sense the Vampire as he did the Depth Charge?

  Tusker was dropping faster now, any buoyancy he had higher up long gone. The ocean was reeling him in. He inflated his wing with what seemed like a lot of air, and his descent finally slowed. He was deep enough now that it would be safe to switch on his torch. As he did, something big flashed just in front of him and then was gone. He felt a pulse of current from its thrust. A big fish? A whale? A giant squid ascending after dark to feed? He cast the beam of his torch around in wide arcs. Nothing. Did he imagine it? Never mind the wildlife. Time to find that shipwreck. Tusker was both glad and worried to see the sea floor below him. He hadn’t overshot and ended up in the abyss, but the moonscape of the bottom also meant he’d missed the wreck.

  He checked the heading on his compass. He had no idea in which direction the Vampire lay, so he would have to swim big patterns until he found the ship: off in one direction for 20 seconds, then a right-angle turn, then swim another 20 seconds and so on until he’d returned to his starting point. He’d increase his swim times and do the same pattern until he bumped into the wreck.

  On his third turn, something in the torch beam caught his eye. On the seafloor, what looked like a box. Tusker swam over and examined it. It was an ammunition box, and next to it, some .50-caliber shells lay strewn on the silty bottom. The ship had to be close by. He swung the torch beam around and saw something else in the distance, reflecting back the light. It looked huge and silver.

  Tusker swam slowly in the direction of this shimmering object. It got brighter as he got closer and seemed to be moving, rippling. Then, when he was almost on top of it, it exploded into a thousand pieces. It had been a swirling school of silver amberjacks, swimming in a choreographed vortex. They’d scattered. He shook his head, groggy from the depth and rattled by this apparition. Now he’d have to resume his swimming pattern. He had to find that wreck, but his bottom gas would only last 40 minutes and he’d used up four on his search.

  As he turned to start swimming, he brushed against something. A wall of coral, rising up from the bottom. And—yes—a perfect circle. A porthole. He’d found the Vampire.

  Terminal Depth

  On board the DSV Depth Charge. 30 minutes earlier.

  Malcolm Rausing emerged from his stateroom aboard the Depth Charge, locked the door, and descended the stairs to the dive deck. On the steel staircase overlooking the moon pool, he paused. It was pitch black aboard the ship, as he’d ordered, but he could hear the clanking of metal and the low chatter of men working below, readying the hoist and diving bell. The air was moist and smelled of the sea. The ship rolled heavily on big swells. These weren�
�t ideal conditions for diving, but Rausing couldn’t wait any longer.

  Murray and Aitkens had been waiting in the hyperbaric chamber for three days since their first dive to the Vampire, remaining in saturation at an effective 350 feet of pressure until their second attempt to salvage the bomb. They passed the time watching porn on the internet, reading, and sleeping. McElroy’s personal effects lay in a heap on his bunk, a constant reminder of his horrific fate, but the two divers didn’t dare speak of him. They’d be diving without a third, a bell man. It would be risky, but then everything about this project was.

  “Keep yer feckin’ dirty clothes on yer bunk, will ya?” Murray threw a pair of thermals at Aitkens, who laughed. The two men had known each other for years, having dived together out of Aberdeen in the ‘90s. It was Murray who’d coaxed Aitkens out of retirement for this “easy money” job in Sri Lanka, and the two men intended to treat it like a tropical holiday. They’d already planned to fly to the Maldives the next week with their newfound wealth.

  “Prepare to transfer to the bell,” came the disembodied voice from Dive Control. Murray nodded up at the camera in the corner of the room. The two men moved to the ladder and climbed up to the pressure hatch in the ceiling.

  “Equalized. Transfer to the bell.” Aitkens climbed the ladder, spun open the lock and pushed the hatch up into the diving bell. It was hot and muggy inside, and the two Scottish divers’ faces shone with sweat. Murray closed the hatch with a thud and spun the lock shut. They sat down on the metal benches surrounding the hatch, which would be their exit to the sea, while the hoist slowly began to lift them off of the pressure chamber. The men braced themselves as the bell swung free and rocked lightly. Like astronauts in a crude capsule, they were about to be sent into an alien and hostile environment.

  “Good dive, gentlemen,” came Dive Control’s voice. Then Rausing’s voice.

  “The cargo should be close to the hatch, with the lift bags still attached,” he said coldly. “Bring the hoist over to the opening so you can secure it close to the wreck.”

  “Piece of cake, skipper,” Murray replied. “Like hooking a dead fish.” His joke was met with silence.

  “Tell that to McElroy when you see him,” Rausing finally said, then clicked off.

  Murray shuddered at the thought of the dead man inside the Vampire, whose sopified body they’d no doubt encounter in a few minutes. He’d done body recoveries before, and seen plenty of corpses, but not that of anyone in whose death he’d taken an active part.

  The bell splashed into the moonpool where, despite being protected from the open ocean, it rode the up-and-down of the night’s big swells. In a few moments, the bell was lowered into the depths and there was no sensation of movement at all. Only the depth gauge on the wall showed their progress to the sea floor. 150 feet, 200, 250, 300, then finally stopping at 330 fsw, “feet seawater.” It was silent. The men were no longer sweating. The cooler temperature at depth chilled the bell, and the cold sweat on Murray’s neck made him shiver.

  “Terminal depth. Divers, prepare to exit the bell,” came the instruction from Dive Control.

  When both divers had their helmets secured, tool harnesses buckled on, and umbilicals connected, Murray bent and unscrewed the hatch in the floor of the bell. He felt the familiar moment of uncertainty: if the pressure was not equalized, the seawater would pour in and fill up the bell in seconds. But the pressure was right and, like it always did, the ocean lapped at the platform like a hotel kiddie pool. Strong flood lights illuminated the water below, but beyond the white arc, the sea was black. Small fish flitted in the pool of light, like insects drawn to a lantern.

  Aitkens was the first to descend the ladder, his multi-colored umbilical trailing behind him, unspooling from its rack inside the bell. He dropped into the blackness. Murray, whose role on the previous dive was to remain as bell man, followed him out. Leaving an empty bell was against ordinary protocols of diving safety. But this was anything but ordinary diving.

  The divers dropped 15 feet and landed feet-first on the silty bottom. “Divers on the bottom,” Aitkens dutifully reported to Dive Control.

  The Vampire’s sloping hull rose directly in front of them. Murray glanced at Aitkens and gestured for him to stay put, then took two big, low gravity strides and vaulted onto the edge of the gash in the steel hull and dropped inside the bowels of the ship.

  Deep Despair

  350 feet beneath the Indian Ocean. The same night.

  Unlike his first dive on the Vampire, Tusker had managed to arrive amidships instead of at the bow. This would make his swim aft much shorter—good thing, because he needed to save breathing gas. The current was lighter tonight. Maybe his luck was changing. He’d shed his small travel bottle and was now breathing off of his helium bottom mix in his twin tanks. As he swam further he could see the big Bofors gun on the port deck, still pointing up at the surface in vain. It had been last fired 75 years ago at a swarm of Japanese fighter-bombers.

  Ahead of him he caught a flash of light, then another. He instinctively switched off his torch and stopped swimming. At night a candle’s brighter than the sun, he thought, hoping they hadn’t seen him, even at a distance. It was so dark that he couldn't see his own hands, only hear his gurgling breath, which roared in his ears. Two pinpricks of bright white light dropped from an eerie overhead floodlight. The diving bell of the Depth Charge. They’d put divers in the water already. Tusker had hoped he’d get there first. So much for changed luck.

  Tusker collected himself and clamped his teeth around the mouthpiece. He’d have the element of surprise at least, and be slightly more mobile as a free swimmer than the tethered divers in their helmets and bulky suits. But he was outnumbered, and they had an unlimited supply of breathing gas, a luxury he didn’t have.

  Using the glow of the bell and the headlamps of the divers as a guide, he slowly finned forward, hoping the bright finish of his steel tanks didn’t catch a reflection. He saw one diver, with his back to him, dragging a massive hoist hook along the sea bottom. The second diver was nowhere to be seen, but Tusker saw a glow coming from inside the hull. Yes, he’d gone in to fetch the bomb. They were planning to raise it with the hoist.

  Tusker felt for the Vampire’s hull in the dark and followed it down with his hand until he felt where it curved under, near the sea floor. He unclipped the heavy limpet mine from his harness and set it on the sand under the overhanging edge of the hull. He’d come back for it later. He needed to deal with these divers first. Fonseka had showed him how to use the mine back in Trinco and Tusker hoped he could remember.

  Slowly, he swam up behind the first diver. He didn’t relish the thought of killing but there was no time to consider the ethics. These men were here to steal a weapon of mass destruction and he had to stop them. He reached for the dive knife strapped to the inside of his right calf, a Wenoka Blackie Collins he kept razor sharp. It was a bigger knife than was the fashion with divers these days, a so called “pig sticker," but he was glad for it as he eyed the twisted cabling and hoses of the umbilical, thick as a man’s wrist.

  Tusker frog kicked to within ten feet of the other diver, then with two quick flutter kicks, he closed the remaining distance quickly. Just before he reached the diver, the man sensed Tusker, perhaps heard his breathing, and turned. He ducked and Tusker slashed, his movements slowed by the water, and missed with the knife. Now he was off balance, his quiver of deco bottles making quick movements awkward. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion, like a fight performed in treacle. Now they were both standing on the bottom, facing each other, Tusker in his fins with a quiver of heavy bottles hanging off of him, and the other man with his oversized helmet and plume of umbilicals trailing off into the darkness.

  Tusker had to kill him quickly, before he could alert others on his radio. He lunged at the man’s legs and tackled him around the ankles like a football linebacker. The diver tumbled in slow motion, the beam of his headlamps casting upward. Now! Tusker regained
his own balance and slashed at the umbilical. He felt his knife purchase, but only nicked a cable, which frayed and unspooled. Nothing that would kill the man, but it must have been electrical: the torch on the helmet went dark. He hoped it had cut the diver’s camera and radio feed too.

  The eerie ambient light from the diving bell above lit the scene on the sea floor like a minimalist Greek tragedy, an armored warrior grappling with a minotaur on a naked stage. The other diver was on his knees now. Tusker felt a rush of water and saw the man’s arm rise and fall. He felt a thud on the side of his head and reeled back, dazed. The diver had switched on a backup battery-powered torch on his helmet and Tusker could see the light cutting through a cloud of silt. The diver raised his arm again. He was holding a pry bar. This time, Tusker dodged the blow, which struck the sand harmlessly.

  Tusker reached out with his right hand and grasped the umbilical. The diver shook his head like a dog in a tug of war but Tusker had got behind him and stayed there, matching his frantic twists and pivots. He brought the big knife up and sawed it through the umbilical and then the hose to his bailout bottle. There was a torrent of high pressure gas. He let go and watched as the diver weaved drunkenly along the seafloor, clutching the valves on his helmet, vainly trying to regain some breathing gas. Tusker could hear him grunting away the little gas remaining in his helmet, his torch light dancing crazily as he stumbled away. Tusker watched him fall to his knees and, with one hand, reach out to Tusker. Then, the diver slowly fell over onto the sea bed with a puff of silt, writhed briefly, then stopped moving. Tusker felt his gut wrench momentarily, then turned away.