Depth Charge by Jason Heaton (carter reed .txt) 📗

developing world: short wheelbase, a sliding door, the engine under a hump mounted under the middle of the vehicle, not the most pleasant place for a six-hour drive across Sri Lanka. The van was crammed with gear, a cooler, a single dive fin, quart oil bottles, and the repaired dredge pump in the back.

The driver, Srivathnan, was a dark-skinned Tamil man with a big smile. Tusker never could pronounce his name right and called him Nathan. When Tusker came out of the Rampart Inn with his duffel bag, Srivathnan started the engine. Tusker nodded to him and piled in the back.

At the shed, Ian, Tusker, and Raj heaved the pump out of the back of the van, sliding it in next to the bucket of seawater. Tusker saw Ian’s quizzical look.

“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