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

Tusker laughed as he walked to the side door. “No guarantees!”

The tap was at waist height, on a naked pipe coming out of the side of the house and perched above a slab of cracked concrete. It was dark besides the light from the window and Tusker cautiously looked around before slipping out of his swim trunks. The water was cold but felt good on his salt-dried skin. He lathered up with the tiny sliver of soap and then rinsed off and shut off the tap. He was dripping wet but with no towel to dry off, he reached for the sarong, which hung on a peg nearby. When he turned, Sam was there. In the shadows, he could see that she was also naked.

“My turn,” she said quietly with a smile. She walked past him to the tap, trailing her hand along his naked flank. “Go inside and wait for me,” she said firmly. “And be careful,” she said, eyeing him below the waist. That sarong doesn’t leave much to the imagination. We don’t want to scare our poor hostess.”

A Father’s Secret

Aberdeen, Scotland. Two years earlier.

Malcolm Rausing rarely stepped foot on dry land. He preferred the freedom of the open sea, with its murky and arcane laws. Rausing Oceanic’s ships were built by the lowest bidder, paid for by the highest bidder, flagged in Panama or Liberia, operated by Pakistanis and Filipinos and largely immune from oversight or prosecution. The high seas were the last frontier, the Wild West, and that was just the way Rausing liked it.

When he decided it was time to shutter the company’s de facto headquarters once and for all, Malcolm Rausing sailed into Aberdeen aboard his latest ship, the DSV Depth Charge, to pay a final visit. The office, in a harbor-front building that once looked out on the company’s fleet, sat neglected, its view now blocked by shiny condominiums. It was staffed by an underpaid skeleton crew of secretaries and cleaning crew who rarely showed up to work. Rausing ordered all of the company’s legacy documentation be digitized and then destroyed. This was all to be done secretly by employees promised a lucrative pension. Only his personal office, once Angus Rausing’s, was to be left untouched. He would look to that.

His father’s old desk was a massive oak affair, built from leftover timber from Rausing Oceanic’s first ship in the 1950s. Its surface was scarred and covered with a film of dust and heaped with unopened mail. A scrimshaw letter opener lay in a tray beneath a green shaded lamp and an assortment of nautical paraphernalia lined the corners, booty salvaged by Angus during his time as a diver. Malcolm Rausing hated this place. It was drafty and dark and smelled of the past, a past he never knew, yet disdained. His father’s portrait glowered from the reception area. Burn it with the rest, Rausing thought.

In a locked lower drawer of the desk was his father’s dive logbook. Malcolm had never bothered to look at it. He’d heard enough of his father’s war stories of diving in far flung places, refloating sunken ships, de-mining harbors, and retrieving bodies. But before tossing it on to the growing pile of papers to be destroyed, something compelled him to open it. He flipped its wrinkled, stained pages, mostly scratched with depths, bottom times and locations, until he reached the final entry, scrawled in a shaky hand that he recognized as that of his crippled father:

Ceylon. 15 April, 1942. Vampire salvage, 59 fathoms.

It had been his last dive — killed his partner, too. Angus Rausing had told Malcolm little about it, and he’d only pieced together sketchy details. He read the last line in the dive log’s final entry:

Weapon. Aft bomb room. Atomic?

He thumbed the pages thoughtfully. Ceylon. What did they call it now? Yes, Sri Lanka. He slipped the logbook into his briefcase, clicked off the lamp and strode out of the office. “I’m finished here,” he said to no one in particular, shutting the door behind him.

A month after Rausing sailed out of Aberdeen for the last time, the offices of Rausing Oceanic burned to the ground. Local authorities traced the cause to some old wiring and insurance paid out £2 million. By the following spring, the footings for new condominiums had been laid on the property.

Chance Encounter

Four miles south of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. Present day.

The taxi rattled off, its loud exhaust coughing well into the distance. Tusker and Sam stood slightly dazed in front of the Deep Blue Resort, both in sarongs, their diving fins and buoyancy harnesses at their feet. It was two in the afternoon and the place was quiet.

The old cook was peeling potatoes and looked up as she entered, startled to see her. He clutched her in a tight, awkward embrace and then stepped towards Tusker, who stood behind her. He thought twice about hugging him, but nodded his head and smiled a toothless grin. Sam exchanged excited words with him in Sinhala.

“Thathi went up to Trincomalee after we called this morning to talk to the navy about what happened,” she said to Tusker. “We should get changed and get up there. I’ll drive.” She left the kitchen and hurried to her room. Tusker jogged to catch up.

“Did the cook say where Roland is?”

“He’s gone,” she said tersely. “Never came back apparently.”

Tusker nodded. “I’ll grab Upali’s laptop so we can show the ROV footage to someone at the navy. That should spur some action.”

The GoPro he’d taken on their Vampire dive was now somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, having fallen off during their long night of drifting. The ROV video of the helmet would have to suffice. Tusker set off in a jog towards his room.

Someone had been there. The room wasn’t any messier than he’d left it, but his backpack was not hanging on the back of the door. Upali’s computer bag was on Ian’s bed. The laptop was