Depth Charge

by Jason Heaton

  Rumors quickly spread: the Tamil Tigers were back. It was a Chinese submarine, an underwater volcano. In Colombo, President Halangoda was awakened by his private secretary to receive the news. He immediately knew what it was, but feigned surprise.

  Ten miles out to sea, Tusker opened his eyes. His head was throbbing and he struggled to remember where he was. All he could see was a haze of orange. As he regained his senses, he realized he was buried under a pile of life jackets. He clawed his way out as if swimming until he recognized the sterile interior of the hyperbaric lifeboat. The rows of seats were still bolted to the floor, but everything else had been ripped from the walls, the storage compartments and ceiling and thrown around the cabin.

  Tusker could hear a steady hum and the sloshing of water. He took a deep breath— and realized that if he still could, the lifeboat had not been breached by the blast. The boat was effectively a floating compression chamber, and they were still trapped at the equivalent of 350 feet of water pressure. But at least they were alive.

  But what about Sam? Tusker swiveled around and saw her slumped in one of the seats. She’d fastened herself with the four-point safety harness as he’d told her to do. But was she alive?

  Tusker waded through the piles of debris on the floor to her. He leaned in, with his ear next to her face, hoping to hear, or feel, a breath.

  “Trying to take advantage of a vulnerable woman?”

  Tusker pulled back with a grin. “Are you OK?” He clutched her face in both hands and studied her eyes.

  “Sure,” she replied. “I mean, I think so. I may have dozed off there.”

  “Well, thanks for caring about me!” Tusker shot back with a smile. “I was left for dead under a pile of life jackets!”

  Sam laughed. She unclipped her harness and climbed over the seat back. There was a row of small portholes, each about half a foot thick against the hyperbaric pressure. She peered out.

  “Come take a look at this!”

  Tusker joined her at the windows and craned his neck to see out the next porthole. In the distance was an apocalyptic scene. A towering cloud of white vapor culminated in what looked like a massive thunderhead. At the surface of the water was a jumbled mass of indeterminate flotsam—remnants, he grimly thought, of the Depth Charge. Closer to the lifeboat, was a raft of dead fish.

  “I guess that bomb was for real,” Sam said in a quiet voice, still peering out the window. “How did we manage to survive the blast?”

  “I suspect the hull on this boat is really thick, since it has to contain the pressure,” Tusker shrugged. “Thick enough to survive a bomb blast.”

  In fact, the lifeboat had been thrown almost one hundred yards by the force of the explosion. The self-righting lifeboat tossed like a cork, ripping loose everything inside. But the thick walls and high pressure inside resisted implosion. Only now, they were adrift.

  “We’ll just have to wait to be found, I suppose,” Tusker said, aimlessly throwing debris into heaps in an attempt to tidy the cabin. “We have no way to pilot this thing.”

  Tusker and Sam were merely passengers. Even the emergency radio was in the boat’s pilothouse, which was visible through the thick front porthole, but as inaccessible to them as the shore itself.

  “It seems we’re destined to always be lost at sea together,” Sam said, smiling wearily.

  “At least this time we have rations,” Tusker replied, holding up a pair of packaged meals he’d found. “Now if we could only find the beer fridge.”

  Prevailing Winds

  Bay of Bengal, eight nautical miles east of Batticaloa. Later that day.

  It had been 30 years since Sebastian de Silva had been on a naval vessel. Now he found himself pacing the decks of the SLNS Samudra, a patrol boat stationed out of Trincomalee, a pair of binoculars pressed to the goggles of his protective mask. He was sweating profusely inside a bright orange hazmat suit. He felt a gloved hand on his shoulder.

  “We’ll find them, machang,” Captain Fonseka addressed him informally, though his reassurance was less than convincing. He was also wearing a hazmat suit, just like the rest of the crew who were scanning the water. Sebastian didn’t lower the binoculars from his face. The scene was carnage: dead fish, a raft of debris.

  “This must have been ground zero,” he said grimly. “The radius of debris seems to spiral out from here.”

  “Yes, and the prevailing wind is offshore, which is good and bad,” Fonseka replied. “The radiation cloud has blown to the east, but it also means so have Samanthi and Mr. Tusk, if…” he trailed off. “There’s little point lingering in this area,” he continued. “I’ll direct the captain to get beyond the debris and we’ll sweep arcs. I’ve also got helicopters coming to search from the air.” He patted Sebastian’s shoulder once more and then walked away.

  ______________________________________

  Inside the hyperbaric lifeboat, Tusker had busied himself with tidying the cabin. He re-stowed the life jackets in their overhead racks, rehung the survival suits in their lockers, and stacked the remaining pile of waterproof cases in a corner. If we’re going to be in here for a few days, might as well. Sam was asleep on one of the small bunks built into the wall of the lifeboat, mouth slightly open, snoring quietly. Tusker’s gaze lingered on her face and tangled, loose braid and he smiled briefly.

  With no means of driving or navigating the lifeboat, they were at the mercy of the currents and wind. At least we’ll be able to safely decompress and have food and water for a few days, Tusker thought. Someone will find us.

  He walked over to a starboard porthole and peered out. The view was distorted from the thick Perspex, but the air looked hazy and to the west he could still see a dark cloud hovering high above the water. He wondered how much damage had been done. Had his plan caused more damage than good? He’d meant to use the limpet mine to destroy the bomb inside the Vampire, not on the surface. Had a wave flooded the coastline, killing thousands? And what about the radiation?

  How long had they been drifting? He glanced at his wrist, then remembered his watch had been lost in the wreck. It made him think of his father, and of the day he had given him the Aquastar. It was on their cabin’s dock at Lac La Belle in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Tusker was nine and had just emerged from the water, struggling with the heavy scuba cylinder. His father, in his wheelchair, shouted encouragement. Looking back he realized that his father knew he was dying. The bends he’d sustained five years earlier had paralyzed him from the chest down. Worsening pneumonia had made it difficult for him to breathe. But he insisted that he would teach Tusker to dive, even if it meant doing it from the dock.

  “Stay too long, too deep, and you’ll end up like me,” he had smiled at young Julian. “You’re going to need a good watch.” He pressed the Aquastar into Tusker’s palm.

  Tusker felt a deep sadness looking at his empty wrist and wondered what his father would have thought of him now. He hoped he’d be proud of him.

  Suddenly, he was jolted out of his thoughts by a loud thwack-thwack. He knew what it was immediately. A helicopter.

  Fallout

  Sri Lanka. Six months later.

  A month after the mysterious explosion, the coastline between Trinco and Batticaloa still stank from the dead fish drifting ashore. Debris was washing up as far south as Arugam Bay and a mutilated corpse was discovered in the lagoon at Pasikudah. Fishermen returned to harbor with empty holds and recreational diving was declared off limits by the marine authorities.

  President Halangoda’s opponents accused him of a cover up. Rumors of a secret deal with the Chinese swirled. The president deflected the criticism, suggesting an ISIS connection and even briefly jailing the mayor of Batticaloa. Ramadan was a subdued affair, with the minority celebrants wary of backlash and violence. After a brief delay and cleanup from the flooding, the harbor project resumed. A Chinese diving firm was brought in to finish the underwater work there.

  Despite the turmoil, Halangoda easily won re-election, runn
ing on a nationalist anti-Muslim platform with the strong backing of the Sinhalese majority and the Buddhist Power Army. In the swearing in of the new government at Parliament, a traditional Buddhist blessing was given by the Venerable Udugala Dhammasara.

  Sebastian de Silva closed down the Deep Blue Diving Resort and headed back to Colombo to await the start of the West Coast diving season. It promised to be a challenging one. Tourism was down and the southwest monsoon was running late this year.

  Ahmed Raheem had had enough. He shuttered his garage in Pasikudah and made plans to move his family to Pakistan, where his brother assured him he could find work repairing farm equipment. Before he closed the heavy overhead door to his shop, he took a last look at the half-assembled old Land Rover inside, still on jack stands. He’d been restoring it for years, but it would be too expensive to ship. The new shop owner promised to finish the job. Ahmed hoped he would.

  Ian Walsh stayed on in Sri Lanka, marrying a local woman and accepting Upali Karuna’s old directorship at the Ministry of Culture, History and Archaeology. He had partially recovered from the bends and was able to walk with a cane, but he would likely never dive again. He still enjoyed being on boats and the tropical climate agreed with him.

  In Galle, Raj, the fisherman, went back to his nightly work, plying the offshore reefs for mackerel, snapper, and the occasional shark. One day, while cleaning nets in his shed by the Galle harbor, he knocked over a bucket of dirty water. Something shiny spilled out and he picked it up. It was some sort of shackle from a sailing boat and engraved on its side was a symbol, three lines creating an arrow. He turned it over in his hands and studied it. Deciding it could be of no use to him, he stepped out of the shed and, with the perfect form of the street cricket bowler he once was, heaved it across the road, where it skipped once on the surface of the harbor and sank like a stone.

  Mad Dogs and Michiganders

  Lac la Belle, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. January.

  Dizzying, the stars and the cold. Tusker clipped out of his skis halfway across the frozen lake and crunched awkwardly in a drunken radius away from them in his stiff boots, gazing upwards. He wanted to burn this experience into his memory—the empty loneliness of a billion winter stars, the deep snow, the sharp biting air. He thought of Upali and how he hated the cold of a Michigan winter. He laughed out loud. Sri Lanka seemed a distant memory now—Rausing, Roland, the Depth Charge, all of it.

  It was Tusker’s last night in the middle of nowhere. Tomorrow he would return home, each mile of the drive back spooling in the real world like one of the lunker bass that slept in the lake below his feet. The new semester started in a week, and with it, another crop of students, more campus politics, papers to write, the long slog into spring.

  He snapped into the bindings again. The left one had frozen up with compacted snow and he had to remove a glove to clear it. His fingers burned and he shoved them back into his glove. He forced his boot into the binding, snapping off a splinter of yellow plastic in the process. He couldn’t be bothered now. As long as he could ski back to the cabin, he could deal with a new binding back home next week.

  The cabin was cheerful from a distance. He’d stoked the fire before setting out, and from the smell of the smoke on the wind, he knew it would still be warm inside. He hurriedly took off the skis and leaned them up on the cabin’s small porch, not bothering to wipe the icy buildup from them. As he stepped into the cabin, the warmth enveloped him. He stripped off his anorak, cap, and gloves, and tossed them in a heap on the bench inside the door.

  “I was about to send out the search party.” Samanthi de Silva smiled at him from across the single room. She was sitting on the floor near the fire, her knees pulled up to her chin. She wore one of Tusker’s thick sweaters and her hair was pulled back, a few wisps trailing down around her face. The firelight made her skin glow.

  “I need to teach you how to ski!” Tusker replied and pulled off his boots.

  “Um, no thanks. I’m quite fine here by the fire.” Sam held out a silver flask. “Take a pull, it’ll warm you up.”

  Tusker took it from her and tipped it back into his mouth. The scotch was warm and smoky. He took another drink, then screwed down the cap.

  “It’s gotten colder outside,” he said, sliding down next to Sam on the rug. She’d kept the fire fed with logs and it danced in the grate.

  “I can tell!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you dare come to me for warmth with your cold hands. Nobody made you go outside!” She mockingly pulled away from him. “You know the saying, ‘Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noon day sun?’ Well, I think there must be one about crazy Americans and the midnight snow.”

  Tusker laughed and slid his cold hand under her sweater against her warm, bare stomach. She shrieked but didn’t resist. He leaned in and kissed her hard, sliding his hand further up. Her mouth was warm and tasted of whisky.

  “Get out of those wet clothes,” she whispered, pulling at his wool undershirt. “You’ll catch a chill.” He peeled off the damp shirt, then his ski pants and sat there, exposed, in front of the fire, which snapped and fizzed. He was buzzed from the scotch and dazed with desire.

  “Your turn,” he said to Sam. This time, she said nothing but only met his gaze. She slowly got to her knees and pulled the sweater over her head. She wore nothing underneath. When she leaned close to him, he could hear her breathing. Her eyes were like black pools, and Tusker could see the fire reflected in them. He pulled her down. She gasped.

  “See, winter’s not so bad, is it?” he said quietly. As if for emphasis, the wind outside moaned in the pines. A log fell in the fireplace, sending up a shower of sparks.

  She grinned. “As long as you have someone to keep you warm.”

  Epilogue

  By the summer of 1942, the American atomic bomb program, known as the “Manhattan Project,” had gained momentum, despite getting a later start than the British Tube Alloys program. The sheer might and resources of the United States quickly outstripped the efforts of its ally across the Atlantic. By early 1943, with secrecy considered paramount, information sharing had dried up almost entirely between the US and the United Kingdom.

  Sensing that his country’s nuclear ambitions were slipping away, British prime minister Winston Churchill finally negotiated terms of collaboration with American President Franklin Roosevelt. Signed in August, 1943, the Quebec Agreement formalized the absorption of Tube Alloys into the Manhattan Project, with a promise of collaboration, both “industrial and commercial.”

  The agreement stated that, "First, we will never use this agency against each other; secondly, we will not use it against third parties without each other's consent; and thirdly, we will not either of us communicate any information about Tube Alloys to third parties except by mutual consent.”

  On 9 August, 1945, at 8:15 local time, an American bomber dropped an atomic bomb, nicknamed, “Fat Man” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, a second bomb, called “Little Boy," was released over Nagasaki. They remain the only two nuclear weapons ever deployed in wartime. Japan formally surrendered shortly afterwards, ending World War II.

  The HMAS Vampire, sunk by Japanese aerial attack on 9 April, 1942, has never officially been found.

  Acknowledgements

  A lot of people have the dream of writing a novel. I did for many years and, in fact, wrote about 50 pages of one ten years ago, only to abandon it. Even after a long career of writing everything from technical manuals to ad copy to wristwatch reviews, the prospect of sitting down and hammering out 60,000 words of a coherent, entertaining, and well-written story scared me. The fact is, it’s a daunting task.

  There are a few things that I’ve found separate the creation of a novel from other genres of writing. First of all, the sheer discipline and perseverance to face the blank page for an extended period. I’ve read that Alistair Maclean wrote his thrillers in about a month. Ian Fleming wrote one a year, spending three months in Jamaica writing, then flyi
ng back to London to edit. Rinse and repeat. That’s not me. Depth Charge has taken 18 months, from first word to printing.

  And then there’s the research. Though only a handful of saturation and technical divers, Sri Lankan Buddhists, or British historians might read this book, I didn’t want to get details wrong in any of those fields of expertise. Online research can only get you so far, and the worldwide pandemic prevented me from being able to travel for specific reconnaissance. So I had to lean on a number of subject matter experts for their help and critical eyes.

  Paul Scurfield provided valuable early feedback on some chapters involving saturation diving and Jason Van der Schyff reviewed the book near its completion with the same focus. Their input was essential to getting those scenes as accurate and believable as possible, though I still took some liberties.