Depth Charge

by Jason Heaton

  The man came out of the shadow of the tree. He was older, maybe 50, with leathery skin and pale blue eyes. He wore surf trunks and a stained t-shirt, faded from red to a sort of pink, with the logo of a Caribbean diving resort on it. He walked over to Tusker and held out his hand. “Roland Van der Schyff. I’m from the Netherlands.” His smile was yellow and his voice had the tortured hoarseness of a regular smoker.

  “Nice to meet you both,” Tusker said, finding his manners despite his impatience. “I’m looking for Sebastian. Hoping to get out diving this afternoon.”

  “Sebastian is out with the Russkies,” Roland replied. “Diving the Hermes.”

  “Is there a second boat?” Tusker asked.

  “I could take you out. I’m sort of an unofficial second mate around here. You know, fill tanks, fix boat motors, that sort of thing. Where do you want to dive?”

  “Just outside the lagoon. The wreck of the Taprobane.”

  “Is that a good idea, Cap’n? I mean, isn’t that a police matter?” Roland fidgeted with a damp cigarette.

  “I just spoke with the police and they’re not equipped to investigate the sinking.” Tusker said, matter of factly. It’s not really a lie.

  “Well, if you think so, Cap’n, I can run you out there. Drops off deep just there, I think. You’ll want double tanks. Could run into a little decompression time.”

  “Great,” Tusker said, already turning to go, “I’ll meet you in the shop for some tanks.”

  “See you later, Tusker,” Anja called to him. Tusker pivoted and gave a wave. Another time, he’d have gotten to know her. But he was preoccupied and in no mood for the coy parry and thrust of seduction.

  Ian was in their room, making a heap of dive gear on the floor. “Any luck?” he said to Tusker.

  “Yeah, the Dutch guy is going to take us out. We’ll dive doubles.”

  “I figured this was deco territory. Everything worth diving over here is deep. Sorry, that didn’t come out right.” Ian said, sheepishly.

  An hour later, they were motoring out of the lagoon in a small fiberglass skiff loaded with gear. There was no canopy against the sun. The sea was flat calm and shimmered as if covered with a film of oil. They had no trouble spotting the makeshift buoy the police had placed to mark the location where the Taprobane had sunk. It consisted of no more than a cinder block dropped over the side, 200 feet of nylon rope, and a plastic bottle. As Roland slowed the boat, Tusker looked around and felt a spasm of sadness. He thought back to that last text message from Upali. He had been excited about finding a new wreck, the dream of any marine archaeologist. He never could have imagined ending like this, Tusker was sure of it.

  “I can’t really tie off to this buoy, but there’s not much current,” Roland said. “I’ll just keep the boat around while you guys are under. Don’t worry, I’ll be here when you come back.” The yellow smile.

  Tusker nodded back. The charts showed the depth at around 180 feet, well beyond recreational limits and necessitating some decompression before they could surface. A 20-minute dive would require 50 minutes of decompression: hanging on the buoy line in stages as they slowly ascended, allowing their bodies to respirate the excess nitrogen that had been forced into their blood vessels and tissues. Taking into account time and greater air consumption at depth, Ian and Tusker both wore twin 80-cubic foot cylinders of air, with two regulators for redundancy, just in case.

  Lifting that gear up to the tiny boat’s gunwales was clumsy, heavy work. Sitting on opposite sides of the boat, Tusker and Ian made eye contact and Roland gave a countdown. “3, 2, 1, go!” Tusker and Ian backrolled simultaneously over the side into the water and immediately descended into the indigo blue water.

  Sunken Crime Scene

  Bay of Bengal, one mile offshore of Batticaloa. The same day.

  Tusker could see the Taprobane’s white foredeck below as soon as he began descending, as if she was still afloat and he was hang gliding above her. The ship lay upright on the seafloor. At first, she showed no signs of damage, and Tusker found himself thinking that maybe there was no explosion. Could it have just sank, and the crew swam ashore? It wasn’t that far offshore. It was all just a misunderstanding.

  Then he saw the body.

  It was Suresh, the sonar expert. Tusker had met him back in Galle when they were surveying the harbor. Tusker remembered giving him a hard time for being afraid of the water, threatening to push him overboard if he didn’t behave. His body was pressed up against the inside of the cabin window, pinned by the buoyancy of his orange life jacket, which he always dutifully donned before leaving the dock. Tusker looked at Ian and could tell he’d seen the same thing.

  Tusker settled on the sand bottom where the Taprobane rested and checked his depth gauge. 187 feet. He briefly watched the march of the Aquastar’s seconds hand tick tick tick around the dial. Its steady precision calmed him. Ian nudged him with a quizzical look. Snap out of it, man. At this depth, the nitrogen in the air they were breathing had a narcotic effect. It affected people differently. Some got paranoid, others panicked, but for Tusker, it caused time to slow down. On some deep dives he’d become obsessed in minutiae, staring at the nibbling of a fish or the seconds hand of his watch in what afterwards felt like a timeless fugue state.

  A newly sunken 46-foot wreck is easier to explore than a larger, older one. While Tusker explored the torn rear dive deck and cabin, Ian swam down the length of its white hull and around behind the transom, which had been customized by MOCHA to allow easier entry for divers climbing the ladder. Then he saw the gaping wound in the boat’s port-side hull. The white aluminum was now black and twisted. He could see into the engine compartment through the ragged gash. He banged his tank to get Tusker’s attention.

  Tusker swam down to Ian and saw the maw in the hull. He reached into the pocket on his harness belt and took out a measuring tape. He ran it along the hole in the hull and made note of it on a waterproof slate strapped to his wrist. He pulled the knife from its sheath on his lower leg and prised off a small flapping piece of the torn steel hull. He swam a few feet away to take another look. Tusker thought for a moment. This wasn’t the result of any scuba tank exploding. The pattern of damage reminded him of sunken warships he’d surveyed that had been hit by torpedoes or collided with mines.

  Ian was below, scouring the sea floor for clues. It occurred to Tusker that Ian was spending longer at greater depth than he was. He can take care of himself.

  Tusker swam inside the boat’s cabin and began carefully pulling debris out of the forward hold, looking for anything at all that might provide answers. It was all ropes, cushions, life jackets, and a jumble of tools and equipment. Suresh’s body was still trapped against the window. There was no way to do a body recovery with Roland and that small skiff. They would have to have Captain Gooneratne send out a police boat and then float Suresh’s body, and any others they found, to the surface with lift bags. It was grim business.

  Where were the other bodies? Probably thrown overboard by the explosion, Tusker thought. Or maybe they jumped off when the Taprobane started to sink. They’d either be on the seafloor somewhere or would wash up on a beach down south in a few days.

  The ROV was lying a few yards off of the wrecked boat, looking ready for action. Could it be salvaged and returned to MOCHA? Tusker made note of that for later. They’d come back tomorrow with Sebastian and do a more thorough survey, raise the ROV and maybe Suresh’s body.

  He checked his pressure gauge. He’d breathed close to half his air supply, well over the recommended “rule of thirds” which kept one-third for the ascent, and one-third for a safety reserve. The Aquastar indicated they’d been down for 22 minutes. On his right wrist, Tusker checked his Sherwood dive computer. It was a few years old, and he never wore it for the shallow excavation work, but here in deep water it was valuable for calculating his decompression stops on the way up. It was flashing 41 minutes of deco time. They had to start their ascent now.

  Tusker sho
uted through his mouthpiece to Ian and tapped him on the leg. Ian swiveled around. Tusker tapped his wrist and then made the “thumbs up” sign—time to ascend. Ian nodded and they both gave a few kicks to start their ascent. They rose slowly, careful to vent their buoyancy harnesses to prevent a runaway ascent, following the yellow line of the buoy. At 90 feet, Tusker paused, the Sherwood beeping at him, indicating the first deep stop. The nitrogen narcosis fog lifted.

  Tusker looked down. The Taprobane was still clearly visible, almost a hundred feet below. Above him, he could see the outline of the skiff drifting a ways off of the buoy.

  The Sherwood beeped again. Up to 80 feet for one minute and 70 for another. Then he crept up the line: 60 feet for two minutes, 50 feet for three minutes, 40 for four. After a few more short stops, Tusker and Ian paused at 15 feet for 20 minutes. The water was warm here and bright. The surface was tantalizingly close, but to cut short decompression now would risk paralysis or even death.

  Finally the Sherwood beeped an “All Clear” and Tusker and Ian surfaced. The skiff was 30 feet away. Roland was sunning himself, talking on a cell phone to someone. At Tusker’s shout, Roland quickly put the phone down and pulled the outboard to life. “Sorry, fellas, didn’t see you come up!”

  They handed their weight belts and dive gear up to Roland and heaved themselves over the gunwales into the boat. Roland swung the skiff around in a dramatic arc and gunned it. The hull banged across the swells towards the lagoon. “Find anything down there?” he shouted.

  Tusker didn’t feel like sharing details. “Well, it was no accident, I can tell that much.” Roland just grinned, his yellow teeth clamped around a cigarette.

  Back at the Deep Blue, the other skiff was pulled up on the shore. Sebastian and the Russians were back. Tusker jumped off the bow and turned to help Ian with the dive gear.

  “I’m not feeling great, mate,” Ian said weakly. He crouched next to the boat then suddenly lurched forward and fell to the sand. He vomited violently.

  “Ian!” Tusker yelled. He knew the signs: the nitrogen Ian had inhaled under pressure had started to expand in his blood vessels and his joints. His crippled posture and extreme pain were what gave decompression sickness its nickname: “the bends.”

  Gitche Gumee

  Four miles south of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. Later that night.

  It was late when the aptly named Tata Nano taxi buzzed off, leaving Tusker in a cloud of oily two-stroke exhaust back at the Deep Blue. Ian was in the hyperbaric chamber at the Trincomalee naval base up the coast and would stay there for the next few days. For a while there, Tusker had worried he wasn’t going to make it. Roland had helped him get a taxi from the resort for the drive up the A15. Ian was curled in a spasmodic husk of pain in the back seat the whole way, sucking on the emergency oxygen kit Tusker had found in Sebastian’s workshop. Then it ran dry. The doctor had said he’d need at least four days in the chamber while his body was brought back down to a simulated depth and then decompressed slowly. If he was lucky, Ian might regain use of his legs one day.

  Tusker was supposed to be getting on a plane back to the U.S. soon. His visiting fellowship in Sri Lanka was set to end and a new semester of teaching back at Michigan Tech would be starting in a couple months. He could imagine the mail that had piled up back at the post office in Copper Harbor. Then there was the fieldwork in Jamaica next winter to start preparing for. But that all seemed so distant now. He was only thinking one day at a time, for the first time in years.

  The light was on in the dining area, and though he didn’t feel like socializing, Tusker ducked under the thatched roof. Sebastian was sitting alone at a table, eating a plate of rice and curry with his fingers. He looked tired but beckoned Tusker to sit down. “Eat something? You must be very hungry.” He called out in Sinhala and the cook, a rail-thin old man in a sarong and dirty button-up shirt, appeared out of the kitchen. “You want chicken? Fish?” Sebastian asked Tusker.

  “Fish.” Tusker didn’t feel like eating, but he couldn’t remember the last meal he’d had.

  “Malu,” Sebastian said, and the old man nodded and disappeared again. The smell and sound of frying food emanated from the kitchen.

  “Roland told me what happened,” Sebastian said. “Dr. Senanayake is a good doctor. Your friend is in good hands.”

  “I think he was deeper than me for most of the dive. I should have alerted him to it.”

  “Well, everyone reacts differently, and a lot can depend on diet, dehydration, how much sleep he had, if he was stressed.”

  Tusker nodded. Sebastian was trying to be helpful, but his words felt empty. Tusker had seen the effects of decompression sickness before. Watching Ian writhing in the back of the taxi brought to the surface raw emotion. With Upali’s death, it was almost too much to bear. And yet, what was pushing foremost in his mind was that hole in the Taprobane.

  “Did Upali mention anything about their work? Anything strange?”

  Sebastian finished chewing while he thought. “He was pretty excited two nights ago by what they found. Thought it was the Vampire.” He took a swig from a bottle of ginger beer. “But he did say they had found something peculiar in the wreck. Didn’t say what but said he needed to make a trip up to Trincomalee… the navy base, as a matter of fact, to ask them about it. That was the morning they went out to get more video footage.” He looked down at his food.

  The cook came out with a steaming plate heaped with white samba rice smothered in chunks of a meaty fish with a yellow gravy. It smelled delicious.

  “Would you like a fork?” Sebastian asked him.

  “No, I’ve gotten pretty good with my fingers.” Tusker managed a weak smile, “Though I do eat with my left hand. I know that’s a no-no.”

  Sebastian smiled and wobbled his head. “As you wish.”

  “Did Upali show you any footage from the ROV?” Tusker said as he dipped his fingers, knuckle deep, into the curry. It was hot.

  “He did show me some screen grabs. It sure looks like a warship, guns and all.” Sebastian replied. “Oh, he did mention one more thing that seemed odd,” Sebastian said as he rinsed the fingers of his right hand in a small bowl of water and lime. “The day they found the wreck, there was this big commercial diving ship anchored right over the spot. He asked if I knew anything about it or its owner. I said I didn’t. The crew seems to keep to themselves and stay onboard, even when they’re docked in Batticaloa, working on that harbor project.”

  Tusker was wolfing down his curry, shoveling it inexpertly into his mouth from the plate. He stopped chewing. “What is the ship’s name?”

  “The DSV Depth Charge,” Sebastian said.

  “Rausing,” Tusker said and slid back his chair. He recalled the silver-haired man at the China Bay Club who’d taken such interest in the Taprobane.

  “Yes, I think he’s the owner,” Sebastian said absent-mindedly. He had opened a laptop and was scrolling through GoPro video footage from that day’s diving on the Hermes with the Russians.

  “I’d like to dive the Taprobane again tomorrow,” Tusker said. “Can you take me out? Maybe join me for the dive? I’d love to get your take on what I found this morning.”

  “I’m afraid I’m back on the Hermes again tomorrow,” Sebastian said. “But Samanthi will be here and I’m sure she could go along.”

  “OK, sounds good,” said Tusker. “I’ll find her in the morning. Good night, Sebastian.”

  He got up and walked out of the dining area’s island of light and into the dark night. The path was hard to see and he stumbled. Something scurried away under his feet. He found Room 4, put the key in the lock, went in and shut the door behind him.

  Across from Room 4, in the dark beneath the low-hanging branch of an almond tree, the orange tip of a cigarette sizzled to life and then dimmed.

  Tusker flipped on the light and did his usual scan of the floor and walls for insects and reptiles. Nothing. He kicked off his cheap rubber slippers and switched on the ceiling fan. The r
oom was still and hot, but he dared not open the windows, lest a swarm of malarial mosquitoes come for his moist, pale skin. He sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed his face. It was close to midnight. He was exhausted, but something wouldn’t let him sleep just yet.

  In the corner of the room, Upali’s belongings were neatly arranged. He padded over and gingerly sorted through them. It seemed almost sacrilege. A large black cockroach flitted out from beneath the duffel bag, making straight for the bathroom door. Tusker jumped back, swore, and nearly stomped on it before realizing he was barefoot. “You live another day,” he called after it.

  He picked up Upali’s leather and canvas shoulder bag, the faded one Tusker had given him many years ago as a birthday gift. “It’ll help you fit in better here,” Tusker had joked with him. Upali had carried it throughout their college days in Michigan. A wave of sadness passed through Tusker as he opened it.