Depth Charge

by Jason Heaton

  “Get a grip, Mac!” Aitkens shouted to his partner. “You’ve got plenty of gas, so just calm down and figure it out.” No reply, besides more tortured breathing and grunting from McElroy.

  At the surface, dawn was showing itself on the horizon. Malcolm Rausing looked out the port side window of the Depth Charge’s Dive Control station and frowned. The big Rolex on his wrist read 5:15. The delays at the bottom had pushed them towards daylight. Soon they’d have company. The fishermen returning to Batticaloa would not present a big problem. These were simple men scraping out a living, and the sight of a modern ship offshore wouldn’t seem that unusual with the big harbor project going on. The Depth Charge wouldn’t be new to them either. It had been in the harbor on and off for months, as one of many foreign vessels and companies in the country to take advantage of Sri Lanka’s influx of Chinese investments. Still, it only took one fisherman’s gossip to raise questions.

  How could this go so wrong when I planned so carefully? wondered Rausing. Three hundred and fifty feet below, two divers were outside of the bell, panicking, and one more, Murray, inside. The trip up from the depths would take time, as would their decompression. If Aitkens couldn’t fetch the bomb, they would have to come out here a second time to dive the Vampire. It is time we don’t have. Rausing slammed his fist onto the metal desk in Dive Control. It was an uncharacteristic loss of control and the others in the room looked warily at him.

  I knew I should have done the dive myself. But these men had come on good recommendation—discreet, professional. Now things were falling apart. Suddenly, above the usual electronic whines and rumble of the ship came a new noise: the baritone thrumming of a diesel engine. In a few steps, Rausing bounded up the metal stairs to the pilothouse. Captain Kovács lowered his binoculars.

  “We’ve got company.”

  Rausing grabbed the binoculars, a high-powered Leica set, and scanned the horizon. In the growing light of the tropical dawn, Rausing caught sight of a boat moving slowly up the coastline from the south. It was not one of the ramshackle fishing boats he’d expected, but a modern cabin cruiser with a flying bridge and wide, low transom. There were dive tanks strapped to the railings at the back. It was still a couple of miles off but would be on them in ten minutes. Would they pass by? He raised the binoculars again. This time he made out the Sri Lankan flag painted on the bow along with the name “R/V Taprobane.” A government research vessel. Damn it. He had to act, fast.

  Rausing picked up the radio to Dive Control. “Raise the bell,” he said matter of factly. He was met with silence, then it crackled back, “Ah, sir, McElroy and Aitkens…”

  “I said, raise the bell. Don’t question me again.”

  “Yes, sir,” came a stammered reply.

  “Diver 1, get into the bell immediately. Bell diver, switch off Diver 2 and… cut.”

  Inside the bell, Murray raised his eyebrows and shook his head. Wow, ruthless, he thought, then stood up and shimmied around the steel grid platform at the perimeter of the bell to a series of valves marked Diver 1 and Diver 2.

  In the depths, Aitkens had heard the exchange and gave one last look in the direction of McElroy, who was invisible now behind the wall of silt. Then he turned and pulled himself hand over hand up his umbilical as fast as he could so he’d not be ripped up off the bottom by the ascending bell.

  McElroy was in full panic but no one heard him now. Dive Control had shut off his helmet radio. He pleaded and cajoled into the empty microphone as he tugged at his trapped foot.

  Inside the bell, Murray reached for the big handle marked Diver 2 and pulled it perpendicular to the direction of flow. Off. Then he grabbed a hacksaw that was hanging on the wall only for the most extreme emergencies. With a few quick strokes the umbilical fell away out of the bell just as a horrified Aitkens pulled himself up the ladder.

  —————————————————————

  In the pilothouse, a voice came over the radio on the public Channel 16. “DSV Depth Charge, this is R/V Taprobane, do you read?” Captain Kovács reached for the mouthpiece but Rausing grabbed it first.

  “This is Depth Charge,” he said in a mild, almost friendly voice. “Good morning.”

  “Morning,” came the reply. “Looks like you’re running without lights over there. A bit dangerous.” It was a Sri Lankan’s voice, with good English.

  “Thanks for letting us know,” Rausing replied, while gesturing to Kovács to switch on the running lights. “An oversight on our part, sorry.”

  The voice came back. “What are you guys doing so far offshore? I thought you were working on the harbor project?”

  “We just came out for some fresh air last night,” Rausing said, “the air in the harbor is so stuffy, we thought we’d anchor out here for a change.”

  “OK…” the voice sounded confused. “Well, we’re out here for some sonar sweeps and you guys are in our search area. How much longer are you planning to take in the fresh air?”

  “We’ll be gone in a few minutes,” Rausing replied, “just doing some final tweaks to our hoist in open water.”

  “Got it,” came the Taprobane, “we’ll stay out of your way til you leave. Have a good day.”

  “And to you, Captain….?”

  “Karuna, Upali Karuna. I’m no boat captain. I’m with the Ministry of Culture, History, and Archaeology.”

  “Looking for anything interesting out here? Some sunken treasure perhaps?” Rausing gave a brittle laugh. “Or I suppose you aren’t allowed to say.”

  “We’re trying to locate a World War II ship that went down around here. No treasure, I’m afraid.” Karuna chuckled.

  “Well, good luck to you and your crew. We’ll be out of your way shortly.” Rausing clicked off and frowned. Job incomplete and now, interference. He turned to the captain, his eyes noticeably darker with suppressed anger. “As soon as the bell is up, we move,” he instructed and walked out of the pilothouse.

  _________________________________________

  Inside the Vampire, Gus McElroy suddenly felt his umbilical go slack. His helmet lights died—total darkness. Then he couldn’t get a breath. No gas! Had his umbilical fouled when he fell into the hold? He fumbled for his bailout supply valve and twisted it open, feeling a fresh rush of gas into his helmet. But he wouldn’t have long. These tanks were only good for about 15 minutes, less with exertion and panic.

  He pulled against the pipes that trapped his ankle. It was no use. The boot was stuck fast in the gap. Stay calm, Gus, stay calm. They’ll come to help you soon. A hacksaw to cut the pipes, yes, that’s what he needed! Rory wouldn’t just leave me.

  Three hundred fifty feet above him, the diving bell surfaced in a great cascade of water, the crane pulling it aboard through the moon pool. The sun had finally poked above the surface of the Indian Ocean to the east, and on the horizon the first fishing boats were motoring in with their night’s bounty to sell at the market in Batticaloa.

  The bell would be mated to the onboard habitat chamber, where the divers would transfer for their decompression. It would now be even more comfortable with one less diver in the cramped compartment. The big diesels of the Depth Charge came to life and the ship swung around to sail west, towards the coast.

  Sound carries well underwater, far better than in air. Gus McElroy could hear a distant rumble and wondered for a moment what it was. An engine? It couldn’t be! He had only a few minutes of gas left in his bailout bottle, maybe less with his fast, panicked breathing. His booted foot remained stuck in the piping. He had a sudden idea. If he could wriggle out of his dive suit, he could pull his foot free and swim out! In the dark, he felt for the latches for his helmet and unsnapped them. The cold ocean flooded in, causing him to gasp, inhaling water. He resisted coughing and held his breath while he unzipped the suit and struggled out of it.

  He felt his foot pop out of the suit’s integrated boot and the tangled suit fell away. He was free! His lungs were burning now with the buildup of carb
on dioxide and the saltwater burned and blinded his eyes. He smashed into something hard—the bomb—which was knocked off of its neutrally buoyant perch beneath the lift bags and crashed down past him. He paid it no attention. He had to get out of the ship! He hadn’t considered how he’d make it to the surface. His fight or flight instinct was in full bloom.

  McElroy swam in a wild, flailing butterfly crawl inside the dark tomb. His diaphragm spasmed and he fought against the urge to inhale until, in a final primal human reflex, he opened his mouth and took a deep breath of cold sea water. His body drifted down, settling next to his empty dive suit and helmet. The Vampire had claimed its tenth victim.

  The Taprobane

  Bay of Bengal, eight nautical miles east of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. The same day.

  In the morning, before dawn, Upali Karuna and his small team—a boat captain, a sonar expert, and a young intern—loaded up a small dive skiff from Sebastian de Silva’s Deep Blue Resort and motored out to the R/V Taprobane where she was anchored offshore, beyond Batticaloa’s shallow lagoon. There they hefted a sonar device, hundreds of feet of coaxial cable, and a rather expensive remotely operated vehicle aboard and set off to search for a shipwreck.

  The research vessel Taprobane was a 46-foot former navy patrol boat, with a wide aft deck, a broad forward cabin, and plenty of storage below deck. When the Ministry of Culture, History and Archaeology had acquired it from the Sri Lankan Navy after the end of the civil war, they’d refitted it for use as a sonar boat that could serve as a platform for divers. Its camouflaged hull had been painted white and adorned with MOCHA’s official seal, the Sri Lankan flag on both sides of the bow, and her name emblazoned across the low stern.

  Upali stood on the forward deck of the boat, enjoying the predawn breeze and a flask of hot milk tea he’d brought from the Deep Blue. The sky was just starting to turn orange on the horizon. Upali wanted to get an early start, since launching the ROV off of the transom was heavy work that would only be made worse in a blazing midday sun. They’d reach the search coordinates by about 6:00.

  “Hold up, Ranjith!” Upali called over his shoulder to the captain. “We’ve got a vessel in our grid area. Toss me those binocs.” The Taprobane slowed to a crawl, its twin Mercury Marine diesels reduced to a loping rumble. Looking through the binoculars in the dim light, Upali made out a massive ship with no running lights. It looked out of place there, a huge slab of steel where, at most, he might have expected to spot a wooden fishing trawler. Upali squinted. He could just make out two figures in the pilothouse, silhouetted against the eerie green light of navigation instruments. From their stance, they were clearly looking back at the Taprobane.

  As he scanned the ship from bow to stern, Upali recognized the distinctive high superstructure at the front and the low-slung rear deck pierced by the tall skeleton of a powerful crane. It was the dive support vessel he’d seen in Batticaloa harbor, the Depth Charge. But what were they doing out this far? He’d only seen the ship in the gouged-out basin of the forthcoming deep-water port, where its divers were presumably at work fitting pipe or electrical cabling. Otherwise it had always been tied up along the makeshift pier overnight, its crew staying aboard. Were they in trouble? Some sort of power outage causing them to drift and lose their lights? He’d better raise them on the radio.

  “DSV Depth Charge, this is R/V Taprobane, do you read?”

  ————————————————————

  By 6:00, the Depth Charge had moved off. Upali watched it aim for Batticaloa harbor, exhaust trailing behind. “Fresh air…” he murmured, shaking his head. Ranjith guided the Taprobane into position for their search, his eyes on the GPS screen, hands on the wheel and throttle.

  Shipwreck hunting has a romantic sound to it, largely thanks to tales of Caribbean treasure hunts and Clive Cussler novels, but in reality, it is stupefyingly boring. The first step is to identify anomalies on the ocean floor, those features that don’t appear to be naturally occurring objects such as rocks, coral heads, or schools of fish. This is done by dragging a side-scan sonar device behind the boat in a systematic pattern, a process known as “mowing the lawn” and is just about as exciting as walking up and down a suburban backyard. The sonar device, known as a tow fish, is shaped like a torpedo, with a cylindrical body and stabilizing fins at its back end. As it moves through the water, the tow fish sends audio pulses into the depths, which bounce back off the sea bed. This paints a sort of electronic picture of the terrain on a laptop screen on the boat. Man-made objects, usually shipwrecks or pieces of debris, are recognizable by their more geometric shapes on the screen. Right angles and straight lines rarely occur in nature. These anomalies are marked with GPS coordinates to be investigated more thoroughly later with the ROV. A day spent mowing the lawn under the tropical sun, watching a computer monitor for anomalies, is only tolerable with the promise of actually finding something, which rarely happens.

  A few weeks earlier, a fisherman had snagged his line on what he assumed was a rock ledge and pulled up a faded orange life ring with some indistinguishable writing on it. A shipwreck? That would explain the good fishing. Fish tend to congregate around wrecks for their relative shelter on barren sea floors, but there were no known wrecks in this area. Word got back through the fish market gossip, on up to a local politician, who alerted the naval base in Trincomalee. The navy didn’t have the time to go on wreck hunts, so it passed the message on to MOCHA’s offices in Colombo, and that’s how Upali Karuna found himself slowly motoring up the coast on the Taprobane on this cool morning.

  After an hour and a half of mowing the lawn, the MOCHA team decided to investigate a promising anomaly from the sonar scans, a long shadow on the slope of a deep ocean trench that slashes in from the continental shelf towards Batticaloa. Here the sea deepens from 150 feet to over 300 quickly, and then drops over a precipice into 2,000 feet of dark water.

  “We’re here,” Ranjith said, cutting the engine. “Drop anchor now!” Deepa, the intern, threw the anchor off the bow and stepped aside as the chain and heavy rope unspooled into the water.

  On the transom, the sonar man, Suresh, squatted over the ROV, a small robot about the size of an office copy machine. Tethered to the boat by a long, thick umbilical for power and controls, it could drop into the depths, illuminate the darkness with a quiver of powerful lights, and capture what it saw with a high-definition camera. Despite his rather nautical job at MOCHA, Suresh was not much for boats and had never learned to swim. But he was an expert in underwater electronics like the ROV, having interned at Woods Hole in America, and working on the R/V Petrel when it had discovered several important World War II wrecks in the Pacific a few years earlier.

  “She’s ready to splash,” Suresh said, giving one last tug on the cable connection as if to prove his point. He and Upali lifted the robot by its bottom skids and shuffled to the edge of the transom. “Bon voyage, little friend,” Suresh said as it splashed into the water and disappeared below the surface.

  Upali and Suresh settled in at the computer monitor inside the forward cabin. The screen showed a direct feed from the camera on the front of the ROV as it descended through 300 feet of ocean: darkness, with the occasional cloud of drifting particulate reflected in the craft’s 10,000-lumen flood lights. Deepa hovered over their shoulders. This was her first field work as a MOCHA intern, and she was excited at the prospect of actually finding something. Ranjith sat on the transom, smoking.

  “We should have hit bottom by now, eh?” Upali said. The ROV’s depth gauge showed 357 feet.

  “Well, according to the charts, we’re literally on the edge of the dropoff, so if we overshot by even a few feet, we’d be over the side in very deep water,” Suresh said. “Let me alter the heading a bit and bring her back up a ways.” He pulled on the joystick delicately with his fingertips. The depth reading changed, despite the continuous blackness on screen. 342, 337…

  “Whoa, what’s that?” Deepa’s finger darted out, poking the
monitor. They all leaned in. The video feed clearly showed a twisted procession of railing stanchions atop a coral encrusted slab of steel. The ROV had come up almost beneath it. Suresh cursed and quickly maneuvered to avoid entangling the umbilical cable. Must be the bow, Upali thought.

  “Follow that railing,” Upali said. “To the right must be aft.” Suresh didn’t answer, but the view on the monitor, with its wide-angle lens, zoomed along the upper hull of the ship, encrusted with hard and soft corals and the occasional waving sea fan. Then, something unmistakable. A cannon. “We’ve got ourselves a warship,” Upali leaned back and smiled. I’d bet a round of beers that this is the Vampire.”

  “We got very lucky,” said Suresh, not taking his eyes from the screen. “She’s literally hanging over a cliff. A few more feet to the north and this wreck would be in 2,000 feet of water.”

  “A little beyond your diving depth, eh, machang?” Upali elbowed him in the ribs and laughed.

  For the next several hours, they scoured the wreck with the ROV, methodically working from forward to aft, breaking for lunch and, later, some tea. By late afternoon, they still hadn’t found any evidence that positively identified this ship as the Vampire, but Upali was sure that it was. The old war records and British Admiralty charts showed no other shipwrecks in this area, and judging from its size and armaments, it was clearly a destroyer. To know for sure, Upali would compare the footage from the ROV to the photos and engineering drawings he had of the Vampire back at the Deep Blue. He was ready to call it a day. They’d be back out tomorrow with more definite surveying goals. Upali pulled out his phone and dashed off a cryptic message: “Think we’ve found Dracula.” He smiled. Tusker would be so jealous.