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

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