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

They both sat, not talking over the din of the compressor, and watched the evening traffic pass by.

Tusker thought about the artifacts they’d pulled out of the sea bed and dragged the water-filled bucket close to him. He fumbled for the camping headlamp he kept in his backpack and switched it on. He pulled the largest object, a curved piece of dark wood that had a small rusted metal hasp on one end, carefully out of the saltwater bath. It looked to be a piece of a larger ring and was quite heavy.

“What do you reckon?” he said to Upali. “Sail hoop?”

The object reminded him of the hoops used to raise canvas sails on the masts of tall ships. Tusker had seen plenty of them, still intact, on the schooner wrecks of Lakes Huron and Michigan. He knew he shouldn’t fiddle too much before sending these to the lab for proper preservation and analysis, but he couldn’t resist a closer look.

“Don’t mess with it too much, machang,” Upali said, knowing that Tusker, while a skilled archaeologist, was also impatient. “We can get it cleaned up in the lab when I’m back in Colombo.”

“A little cleaning won’t hurt,” Tusker said, grinning. He examined the hoop more closely in the white light of his headlamp. He was convinced it was a piece of sail hoop now, but how old? It was hard to tell. The level of degradation on this one, even in the salty, polluted harbor, made it seem much older than that. On the reinforcement near the hasp he thought he could make out a pattern beneath the rust.

Tusker pulled a folding knife from his soggy cargo short pocket and flicked it open. He lightly scraped the rust away and re-aimed his headlamp’s white beam. Was that…?

“Yup, crow’s foot!” Tusker exclaimed. The marking on the metal hasp was a pheon, the so-called crow’s foot or king’s mark, indicating Crown property. The symbol had been engraved or painted on everything from fasteners and cannonballs to rifles and watch dials since the 1300s.

“This is British Royal Navy all right,” he said and handed it to Upali, who studied it.

“I think you’re right,” Upali said, gently setting it back into the bucket of saltwater. “That makes today’s efforts worth it for sure. And with any luck, what I find out east next week will be even more exciting.”

“Hey man, be careful over there,” Tusker’s tone turned serious. “Those wrecks are deep.”

“Don’t worry, machang. I’ll be back here cracking the whip on you jokers before you know it.”

They both laughed, their laughter quickly drowned out by the roar of a passing bus on the dark road outside.

Into the Vampire

Bay of Bengal, eight nautical miles east of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. Two days later.

Three hundred and thirty-five feet beneath the Indian Ocean, the blinding arc of a Broco cutting torch lit up the black water like an exploding star in deep space. Rory Aitkens squinted behind the dark welding glass of his dive helmet, intent on his task. He’d been at it for over two hours, making slow progress. He and McElroy had spent the first hour of the dive making a survey of the wreck site, first with a measuring tape, then slowly swimming along the upturned hull with a Geiger counter. After they had marked the hull with phosphorescent chalk, Aitkens took over with the torch.

Aitkens had learned his very specialized skills in the North Sea. The son of a rig worker, he’d grown up seeing no other way of life than working the oil fields. By the age of 19, he was cleaning sewage outlet pipes and inspecting ships’ hulls in Aberdeen. Then, the next 15 years he spent welding pipes and replacing valves at 80 fathoms for £600 a day. When his father died in 2001 in the Norskoil Deepstar platform explosion, Aitkens got a sizable inheritance from his will. He quit his day job and spent the next years bleeding away his bank account on expensive wristwatches and Aberdeen’s numerous prostitutes, occasionally taking odd diving gigs that interested him and paid well.

The torch burned at 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, cutting a white hot line into the three-inch thick steel plating, which glowed orange and then quickly dulled to a black bruise. Aitkens was making good progress, though a little slower than planned. Turns out, a ship’s hull designed to resist torpedoes also does a good job against a cutting torch. He’d have the twelve-by eight-foot rectangular hole opened up within the hour.

The torch sputtered and died suddenly, and the ocean went immediately black.

“Oh-two’s lost pressure!” Aitkens said in an annoyed Scottish brogue that was made even less comprehensible by the effects of the helium gas on his voice. At this depth, divers breathe a blend of 80 percent helium and 20 percent oxygen, known as “heliox.” The helium replaces all of the nitrogen in normal air to eliminate its narcotic effects. Heliox provides a clear mind but does have its drawbacks: Helium causes the vocal cords to vibrate faster, raising the voice’s pitch to a comical tone. It also carries warmth away from the body faster; hence the hot water that circulated through Aitkens’ suit.

“Sorry, pressure regulator glitch,” a tinny reply came back down through 100 meters of water. Dive Control onboard DSV Depth Charge was monitoring the entire dive via an audio feed of all divers and the cameras inside the bell and on the divers’ helmets.

McElroy, waiting on the sea bed nearby, heard the exchange, and chimed in through his own helmet’s radio, “Topside, you asleep at the wheel, or what?”

Aitkens chuckled, “We should’ve gotten paid by the hour!” No reply from above, so Aitkens thought better of continuing.

A few minutes later, the high-pressure oxygen feed from the surface resumed. “Should be good now, Rory,” Dive Control squawked. Aitkens squeezed the trigger and sparked the torch back to life.

After another 45 minutes of cutting, the plate, which now resembled a burned outline, hung by a mere few inches of uncut