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

school to mark anomaly sites during sonar surveys. He pushed his sunglasses up on the brim of his cap and squinted at the tiny screen. Without lifting his head, he gestured ahead and to the right, guiding Roland. The skiff bounced over the swells, the motor straining.

“All right, slow down!” Tusker called out. Roland throttled back the little Yamaha outboard. “40 meters… 30… OK, Sam get the anchor ready.”

Sam shimmied to the bow of the skiff and pulled a small grapple from the pile of life jackets and rope. She perched herself on the gunwale, waiting for Tusker’s command. “I hope there’s enough line!” She shouted over her shoulder.

Tusker hadn’t thought of that.“OK, let’s try here. Drop the anchor!”

Sam hurled the anchor over the side and paid out the rope, making sure it didn’t foul on the chaos of gear that clogged the bottom of the boat. The rope snaked out for what seemed like minutes. Finally it went slack.

“OK, Roland, let’s slowly motor forward to see if we’re hooked.”

Roland revved the motor and the skiff moved forward. Sam held the rope with both hands and pulled on it. It went tight. “I think we’re good!” she called out.

Nice work, Upali, Tusker thought. Dead on, first try. His coordinates were perfect. In the bow of the skiff, Tusker noticed that there was no spare line coiled. They’d used it all.

“What’s this spot?” Roland asked in the silence after he switched off the motor.

“We want to check out this new wreck Upali thought he found,” Tusker replied as he stripped off his T-shirt.

“Huh, that Aussie warship he was on about?” Roland asked, fishing for his cigarette pack.

“We’ll find out,” Tusker smiled cagily. Shipwreck hunters were a secretive bunch, their obsession with privacy only exceeded by the CIA and maybe Swiss banks. Part of it came from the early days of claiming salvage rights to whatever booty could be plundered from a wreck, but even weekend trollers on the Great Lakes were tight lipped about their sonar grids. Tusker didn’t know Roland very well, nor did he trust him all that much. But today he’d have to, since he and Sam would be hanging underneath his boat for the whole afternoon.

“This is gonna be a deep one, Roland,” he conceded a bit, to gain the Dutchman’s confidence. “We may be down there a while. Maybe three, three and a half hours.”

Roland smiled, his tobacco-stained teeth flashing. “Roger that, Cap’n. Cell signal is good enough out here for me to stream some porn. Should keep me occupied.” He shot a leering glance at Sam, who’d stripped down to her bikini and was pulling on a wetsuit. “Just to kill some time.”

She ignored him and shimmied halfway into a black five-millimeter suit. Tusker watched her from the corner of his eye while he pulled on his own wetsuit. Her shoulders were deep brown and tight with muscle and as she reached up to tie her hair back, he saw her flat stomach. Her navel had a silver ring through it.

He turned to Roland, who winked. Tusker frowned back at him. “Just don’t fall asleep and let the anchor come unhooked. And if you can, hang some O2 bottles over the side for our last deco stop.”

“Sure thing, Cap’n.” He blew out a stream of smoke and leaned back against the gunwale.

Tusker took off his Mount Gay Rum cap and tossed it in the bottom of the skiff. “Don’t lose my cap, Roland.”

The Dutchman nodded back. “I’ll keep it safe.”

He and Sam busied themselves kitting up, a heavy process made all the more difficult by the cramped quarters of the tiny skiff. The dozen tanks were piled on top of each other, and they had to awkwardly walk over them to reach their gear. Roland made no effort to help.

Finally, Sam and Tusker were ready: twin tanks on their backs, a smaller bottle clipped under each arm, coils of hose for their two regulators across their chests like bandoliers. Tusker had strapped on a waterproof writing slate next to his dive computer on his right wrist. Sam wore a two-millimeter neoprene hood and checked the seal of her mask one last time before giving Tusker an OK sign. He wished he’d opted for a thicker suit. His two-millimeter suit was threadbare and used up. It would be little thermal protection against the chill at 350 feet and the hours of motionless hanging on the way back up.

He cursed his poor planning, then shook it out of his head and signaled back to Sam. They heaved themselves and the two hundred extra pounds of weight they carried onto the edge of the gunwale and tipped back clumsily into the sea.

“See you when I see you,” Roland grinned over the side as they bobbed up, mercifully unweighted. Tusker had already put his regulator in his mouth and simply gave Roland a small nod before deflating his buoyancy wing and disappearing under the surface.

Dark Descent

Bay of Bengal, eight nautical miles east of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. The same day.

The descent took a full four minutes. They went down hand over hand, first pulling on the anchor line to break their initial buoyancy and then letting go, dropping as if pulled down by the invisible wreck below. Tusker took mental note of a light north-south current drawing him away from the taut yellow line. Decompression in a current could be difficult. He and Sam made occasional eye contact as they dropped, watching for telltale signs of mental or physical impairment and keeping an eye on tank valves and regulators for bubbles. Even a tiny leak at depth was cause for concern. They’d need every cubic foot of gas for their long decompression, or else they’d get bent or drown.

Tusker watched the numbers on his depth gauge tick off. The streams of sunlight, so friendly in the first 100 feet, gradually diminished to a flat grey at 150 feet, then to a sort of twilight below 200. As they approached 300,