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

like it always did, the ocean lapped at the platform like a hotel kiddie pool. Strong flood lights illuminated the water below, but beyond the white arc, the sea was black. Small fish flitted in the pool of light, like insects drawn to a lantern.

Aitkens was the first to descend the ladder, his multi-colored umbilical trailing behind him, unspooling from its rack inside the bell. He dropped into the blackness. Murray, whose role on the previous dive was to remain as bell man, followed him out. Leaving an empty bell was against ordinary protocols of diving safety. But this was anything but ordinary diving.

The divers dropped 15 feet and landed feet-first on the silty bottom. “Divers on the bottom,” Aitkens dutifully reported to Dive Control.

The Vampire’s sloping hull rose directly in front of them. Murray glanced at Aitkens and gestured for him to stay put, then took two big, low gravity strides and vaulted onto the edge of the gash in the steel hull and dropped inside the bowels of the ship.

Deep Despair

350 feet beneath the Indian Ocean. The same night.

Unlike his first dive on the Vampire, Tusker had managed to arrive amidships instead of at the bow. This would make his swim aft much shorter—good thing, because he needed to save breathing gas. The current was lighter tonight. Maybe his luck was changing. He’d shed his small travel bottle and was now breathing off of his helium bottom mix in his twin tanks. As he swam further he could see the big Bofors gun on the port deck, still pointing up at the surface in vain. It had been last fired 75 years ago at a swarm of Japanese fighter-bombers.

Ahead of him he caught a flash of light, then another. He instinctively switched off his torch and stopped swimming. At night a candle’s brighter than the sun, he thought, hoping they hadn’t seen him, even at a distance. It was so dark that he couldn't see his own hands, only hear his gurgling breath, which roared in his ears. Two pinpricks of bright white light dropped from an eerie overhead floodlight. The diving bell of the Depth Charge. They’d put divers in the water already. Tusker had hoped he’d get there first. So much for changed luck.

Tusker collected himself and clamped his teeth around the mouthpiece. He’d have the element of surprise at least, and be slightly more mobile as a free swimmer than the tethered divers in their helmets and bulky suits. But he was outnumbered, and they had an unlimited supply of breathing gas, a luxury he didn’t have.

Using the glow of the bell and the headlamps of the divers as a guide, he slowly finned forward, hoping the bright finish of his steel tanks didn’t catch a reflection. He saw one diver, with his back to him, dragging a massive hoist hook along the sea bottom. The second diver was nowhere to be seen, but Tusker saw a glow coming from inside the hull. Yes, he’d gone in to fetch the bomb. They were planning to raise it with the hoist.

Tusker felt for the Vampire’s hull in the dark and followed it down with his hand until he felt where it curved under, near the sea floor. He unclipped the heavy limpet mine from his harness and set it on the sand under the overhanging edge of the hull. He’d come back for it later. He needed to deal with these divers first. Fonseka had showed him how to use the mine back in Trinco and Tusker hoped he could remember.

Slowly, he swam up behind the first diver. He didn’t relish the thought of killing but there was no time to consider the ethics. These men were here to steal a weapon of mass destruction and he had to stop them. He reached for the dive knife strapped to the inside of his right calf, a Wenoka Blackie Collins he kept razor sharp. It was a bigger knife than was the fashion with divers these days, a so called “pig sticker," but he was glad for it as he eyed the twisted cabling and hoses of the umbilical, thick as a man’s wrist.

Tusker frog kicked to within ten feet of the other diver, then with two quick flutter kicks, he closed the remaining distance quickly. Just before he reached the diver, the man sensed Tusker, perhaps heard his breathing, and turned. He ducked and Tusker slashed, his movements slowed by the water, and missed with the knife. Now he was off balance, his quiver of deco bottles making quick movements awkward. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion, like a fight performed in treacle. Now they were both standing on the bottom, facing each other, Tusker in his fins with a quiver of heavy bottles hanging off of him, and the other man with his oversized helmet and plume of umbilicals trailing off into the darkness.

Tusker had to kill him quickly, before he could alert others on his radio. He lunged at the man’s legs and tackled him around the ankles like a football linebacker. The diver tumbled in slow motion, the beam of his headlamps casting upward. Now! Tusker regained his own balance and slashed at the umbilical. He felt his knife purchase, but only nicked a cable, which frayed and unspooled. Nothing that would kill the man, but it must have been electrical: the torch on the helmet went dark. He hoped it had cut the diver’s camera and radio feed too.

The eerie ambient light from the diving bell above lit the scene on the sea floor like a minimalist Greek tragedy, an armored warrior grappling with a minotaur on a naked stage. The other diver was on his knees now. Tusker felt a rush of water and saw the man’s arm rise and fall. He felt a thud on the side of his head and reeled back, dazed. The diver had switched on a backup battery-powered torch on his helmet and Tusker could