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

the open aft deck. Two men were busy maneuvering the hoist, which hung suspended from the crane over the moon pool. She sprinted past them.

“Stop her!” Rausing shouted from behind. Two more men, who were at the ship’s aft hoist near the stern, registered what was happening and started after her. But she had a head start and was dodging the puddles of hydraulic fluid and coiled cable on her way to the back of the ship, where she assumed she’d find a motor skiff or dinghy tied up. When she reached the ship’s stern, sure enough, a rubber boat was there, bobbing on the swells, tethered to a bollard, but only accessible from the next deck below.

Sam looked back. The two thugs from the pilothouse and the two men from the moon pool were now fanning out to surround her. It was at least a 25-foot drop to the Zodiac. If she landed on it, she’d break an ankle at the very least. It was no use. She turned to the men and held up her hands in surrender. Roland walked up behind them, clutching his eye socket, which was still pouring blood.

At least Thathi’s not here, she thought. I can survive whatever they’ve got in store. She glanced around, making mental notes to plot a later escape. The shoreline twinkled to the west, miles away. A swim would be a long shot. It would have to be the rubber boat.

“And you must be the lovely Ms. de Silva.” Rausing had walked up behind Roland, calmly. “I’ve half a mind to drop you where we found you, but with a little less…” He paused and a half smile crossed his face. “Buoyancy.”

“But,” he continued, “keeping you around a bit longer may prove useful.”

A man wearing a headset microphone crossed the open deck of the boat and whispered in Rausing’s ear. He cocked his head and thought for a moment, then turned his attention back to Sam.

“Well, well, speak of the Devil,” he said, and motioned to the two large men from the Zodiac to bring her and follow. “Go clean yourself up,” he said coldly to Roland as they walked past. “And make sure she doesn’t have any more weapons on her.”

They ascended a metal staircase and stepped inside the compartment one level above the dive deck. It was some sort of control room, monitoring the divers below. The air conditioning was blowing frigid, and Sam shivered in her soaking wetsuit. On the video monitors, she could see the inside of a diving bell in high definition. Tusker! She could see him staring up at the camera. If he was in the bell, something was wrong, Sam thought.

“Tusker, look, I can take care of myself up here,” she said to the image of Tusker on the video screen. “You just finish what you started.”

Then, the threat, the exchange over the radio, and another crack on the skull. Sam crumpled to the room’s steel floor.

“Throw Ms. de Silva in the chamber,” Rausing said calmly. His pale eyes looked straight into Sam’s soul. “Mr. Tusk will be joining you there shortly.”

A Grisly Errand

350 feet beneath the Indian Ocean.

Tusker dropped like a stone to the sea floor and landed with a thud, a slow-motion puff of silt billowing up to engulf him. He was starting to shiver from the cold. He’d been in the water for close to an hour now, without the advantage of an umbilical hot water line. He gathered himself and waited for the cloud to settle before walking over towards the Vampire, which loomed like a dark mountain in front of him. The maw in the hull was directly above him, but Tusker knew that the limpet mine he’d hidden earlier was somewhere in the darkness just to his left. Rausing would be watching his every move from the helmet mounted camera. Somehow he had to get it without being seen. But how?

“Get moving.” Rausing’s voice came through clearly in his helmet. Tusker suddenly had an idea.

“I’m having trouble seeing,” he answered back. “This head torch is aimed wrong or something.” He reached up and made a show of fumbling with the head torch, covering it with his hand. The view in Dive Control would be blackness now. He twisted the torch hard until it faced straight up at a crazy angle and quickly kicked up a cloud of silt from the sea bottom.

“Stop fooling around, Tusk,” Rausing’s voice was raised. “Hook the bomb and get back to the bell or it’ll be more than your girlfriend’s ears that are popping.”

Tusker scuffled his feet under the edge of the hull. Yes, there it was. The unmistakable turtle shell bulk of the mine. He squatted down, huffing into the microphone to exaggerate the sound of his effort. With one swift movement, he scooped up the mine, its carabiners still attached, and clipped it to his harness. It would be awkward going now, but he’d have to keep it out of sight of the camera. He twisted the torch back down and aimed it ahead, hoping the commotion and silt had kept Rausing from seeing.

Draped through the cut in the hull, now limp, was the umbilical torn from the diver trapped inside the wreck. Bubbles blossomed from the hole, catching the light from Tusker’s torch before disappearing into the blackness above. He grimaced at the prospect of having to detach the awkward bomb from Murray’s corpse.

“I’m going to take the hoist into the wreck and hook the bomb,” Tusker said in a mechanical voice he hoped would sound confident. There was silence for a moment. Then Rausing replied.

“Use the lift bags to get it out. We can’t risk the hoist fouling on the wreck.”

“I can guide it out,” Tusker replied authoritatively. “Your man is part of the cargo now, and it will be too difficult for me to extricate the bomb from him and the debris.” Silence again. No doubt Rausing was conferring with his crane operator.

“Fine, but make it