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

the beam of light. But there, 15 feet below him, a flash of yellow. Yes! A Kirby Morgan Model 37, the most commonly used commercial diving helmet. Should he bring it up? What good would that do? It would be heavy and awkward to swim with and carry. How had its owner managed to get out without it? he wondered. From the back of the helmet trailed what looked like a twisted umbilical, like the kind that feeds electricity, comms, and breathing gas to a diver. The end of it lay coiled below, out of sight in the rubble. Near the helmet, another familiar object: a full dive suit! It had no sediment on it and from Tusker’s distance, looked almost new. The neck seal was split and the top of the suit torn as if ripped violently open by a superhuman force.

He had to go, but first made sure the red light on the GoPro was still flashing. He hoped the little camera had captured the scene despite the low light and sediment. Just as he started to ascend through this macabre chamber, a distinctive shape caught his eye. It looked like a small, fat rocket, with four fins on the tail and a bloated, bullet-shaped head. A series of what looked like valves or ports clustered around the midsection, with twisted piping connected to them.

It was a bomb alright, but not like any he’d seen before in the holds of B-29s sunk in the Pacific. This one was much bigger and fatter. It looked less aerodynamic. It was bolted to what was left of a badly decomposed wooden skid. Was the Vampire transporting munitions to the Pacific theater? Trincomalee was a major Royal Navy base during the war so this wouldn’t be unusual. But only one, and way back here in the stern? Two limp yellow lift bags hung off of a pair of rings on the bomb. These were clearly modern. He could made out the JW Automarine logo on one of them. It was all starting to make sense in Tusker’s muddled brain.

A loud clanging shook him from his thoughts. Sam. It was time to go. He gave a last look at the bomb and drifted upwards towards the opening, where he could see the light of Sam’s torch flicking to and fro, searching for him. He aimed for her and found the inner lip of the hole in the hull, reminding himself to be careful on the way out. Something brushed his arm. Had Sam come inside to find him?

He angled his torch towards whatever it was. A man was looking back at him, screaming, six inches away. Tusker gasped and violently pushed away, back down into the hold. He was breathing hard. Sam was still clanging on the outside. He aimed his torch again and sure enough, there he was. A man, white and half naked, was pinned against the inside top of the ship. His eyes were open and bulging, his mouth a round “O”. It was, Tusker reflected grimly, the look of abject terror, the moment of death.

He shot up past the corpse and out of the opening. Sam was shouting incomprehensibly through her regulator, pointing at her dive computer. When she saw his face, she stopped. Unable to explain, he simply gestured back down the hull towards the bow and the anchor line. Tusker’s dive computer read three hours, 28 minutes of decompression. The pressure gauge said his twin tanks were half empty. He didn’t have time to calculate his air consumption rate, but knew it’d be close as to whether he’d have enough gas to last the full decompression time. He hoped Sam breathed less than him. Women typically did. Now it was a race against time, and one limited by every single inhalation.

The swim back felt easier, taking just half the time as the journey out. Tusker registered that the current must have strengthened. It acted like a tailwind, pushing them back to the bow. This helped for the swim but would make the ascent tricky. They’d have to hold fast to the anchor line so as not to be blown off the wreck and far away from the skiff above. If that happened, it would be up to Roland to recognize it and follow their bubbles on the surface in the boat.

Tusker saw the familiar stanchions of the forward-end railing and counted them off in his torch beam. The yellow anchor line would appear right about now. Yet he saw nothing.

Sam aimed her beam around, frantically searching for it. Had it come unhooked? Perhaps Roland had to reposition the skiff and re-hook the anchor on the wreck. Then, the light from Tusker’s torch caught a flash of yellow in the water column. It was the anchor line, and he sighed with relief. But when he reached for it, he realized it had no tension. It was drifting in the current. He pulled and pulled and the line coiled in his hands until finally, the loose end of it appeared splayed out in a fray of fibers. The anchor line had been cut.

Free Ascent

Somewhere off the east coast of Sri Lanka.

The same day.

A free ascent in open ocean is risky even without facing four hours of decompression time. Tusker knew this, but he also knew that they had no choice. Without an anchor line to orient themselves at the specific depths for a safe deco stop, they could drift, not only far off the wreck site, but also dangerously up or down in the water column, compromising their bodies’ precious off-gassing. They would have to watch their depth gauges carefully, and each other.

He gave the thumbs-up sign to Sam and they began their ascent. He was already shivering from the cold. God knows where we’ll come to the surface, he thought. All he knew was that with this north-south current, they’d come up well past Batticaloa and miles offshore. But before that, they had hours of desperate hanging in