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

stay for hours. To get around lengthy decompression, the men would remain under pressure inside the bell on the way back to the surface, and then be transferred to a pressurized chamber on board the Depth Charge, where they could either remain at “bottom pressure” or slowly decompress for hours or even days while the ship sailed off-site.

This kind of “saturation” diving has been around since the 1960s, and helped pioneer much of the North Sea and Gulf of Mexico oil fields, as well as numerous clandestine military operations carried out during the Cold War. But this empty stretch of Indian Ocean off the east coast of Sri Lanka held no oil reserves, nor was this a military operation.

Murray, McElroy, and Aitkens ducked into the compression chamber, a schoolbus-length tube of thick steel in the hold of the ship. This would be their home between dives and during the long decompression to bring them slowly back to surface air pressure. An attendant sealed the hatch behind them and checked for leaks. Then the chamber was “blown down,” slowly pressurized to ten times the air pressure at the surface. The divers inside wiggled their jaws and blew against pinched noses as the atmosphere inside pushed against their eardrums.

A face appeared in the thick, small window halfway up the side of the chamber. It was Malcolm Rausing. He pressed a button next to the window and spoke quietly into a microphone.

“Remember what I told you,” he said, “eight meters forward of the starboard rudder and three meters up from the bilge keel.” The divers nodded. “Needless to say, be very careful with that cutting torch.” Again, nods. Rausing made eye contact with both men, but added no smile or well wishes. Then he stepped back and was gone.

“Bottom pressure reached. Transfer to the bell,” the voice from Dive Control echoed in the chamber. The divers collected their helmets and tool belts and walked heavily to a ladder that accessed a hatch in the ceiling of their chamber. Murray climbed awkwardly to the top, spun open the locking wheel, and pushed the hatch open into the diving bell. The bell, which was mated to the chamber, was pressurized to the same ten atmospheres so the hatch opened easily. He ensured all valves were positioned correctly, verified that comms worked and then signaled for McElroy and Aitkens to climb up behind him.

With the divers locked inside, the closet-sized bell was detached from the chamber and swung by a crane until it hung half submerged in the ship’s moon pool, an opening to the sea in the middle of the aft deck of the Depth Charge. As they settled into position for their elevator ride to the bottom, the divers could see some of the crew through a thick Perspex window. They were gathered on the aft deck of the ship silhouetted against the floodlights. Rausing, the tallest, stood with arms folded, a breeze lifting his hair so it wreathed his head in a sort of glowing crown.

Up in the pilothouse, Captain Kovács hovered over a screen with a digital outline of the Depth Charge on it. The ship’s dynamic positioning system whirred on and off, its gimbals and GPS keeping it directly above the exact sea bed coordinates Rausing had specified. All was going to plan. With any luck, they’d be hauling the divers back up in the bell and hoisting their cargo by 0600 and be back in Batticaloa an hour later—nobody the wiser but a few fishermen who’d not thought to ask questions about this gleaming ship that had been in the harbor for the past several weeks.

The hoist whined as it lowered the diving bell through the moon pool into the water. The ship’s floodlights illuminated the bell as it swung gently in the ocean swells. Small fish swarmed the scene, attracted by the light. Slowly, the bell grew smaller and then disappeared from sight, leaving only a bubbling surface. Then the floodlights went dark.

Tube Alloys

Burlington House, London. 12 April, 1942

Sir John Havelock surveyed the Royal Society’s meeting room at Burlington House. It was dimly lit and reeked of tobacco smoke. The other twelve members of the MAUD Committee were puffing on pipes, cigars, or cigarettes, and Havelock instinctively filled the bowl of his own briar pipe after hanging up his raincoat. A cut-glass decanter sat on a sideboard, and the men milled around, talking in hushed tones and sipping sherry from matching glasses.

A door at the end of the room creaked open. In strode George Paget Thomson, the leader of the committee, and another man wearing a dark uniform. They made an odd pair—Thomson a bookish, slightly cross-eyed scientist, the other man a lean, serious-looking military type. The banter stopped and the committee members took seats around a large central table. Rain pattered on the window and, though it was midafternoon, the gloom made it feel like late evening.

“Gents, this is Commander Ian Colter from the Royal Navy’s Intelligence division,” Thomson said, without even a greeting. He gestured for Colter to sit while he himself took a chair at the head of the table. “It seems that we may have a window of time in which to mount a salvage operation on the Vampire. Sir John has been in touch with the Australian Navy, and from what survivors have related, the ship sank fairly quickly after being hit, with most damage amidships. That bodes well for a recovery of our cargo.”

Sir John Havelock nodded from his chair halfway down the table and relit his pipe. Though he was overseeing the test phase of the Tube Alloys project, he had not been a member of the MAUD Committee as long as the others; he’d been brought in only when the prototype device was nearly completed. Havelock’s reputation as a physicist and test engineer had preceded him, and he commanded respect from the men around the table.

The possible loss of their only prototype was a devastating blow to the project, and Havelock