Depth Charge, Jason Heaton [feel good books txt] 📗

success. John Havelock wasn’t so sure. He lingered at the window, looking down at the rain-soaked courtyard, where Commander Colter was climbing into an Austin saloon with Royal Navy markings. As he shut the door, the navy man glanced up, as if sensing Havelock’s gaze on him. He nodded to him as the car drove off, joining the evening Mayfair traffic.

“Godspeed,” Havelock whispered, and turned to go. He had a train to catch back to Cambridge.

Invertebrates and a Crow’s Foot

Galle, Sri Lanka. Present day.

Julian Tusk, “Tusker” to his friends, couldn’t decide which was worse: the acrid stench of the harbor or the detritus-strewn muddy sea floor below it. At least it was cooler underwater. Slightly. He still wore a full-length two-millimeter wetsuit as some protection from whatever permeated this rainbow-sheened soup polluted with diesel, garbage, and a city’s effluence.

There were few fish—living ones, at least. The silty sea bed was littered with the bones of discarded bycatch and cleaned carcasses from the fishermen above, who tossed what wasn’t wanted over the side after their night of hauling in nets offshore. Various invertebrates occasionally scuttled across his limited field of view. He couldn’t name them. Tusker was an archaeologist, not a biologist, and he was braving this toxic morass not for the wildlife but rather to identify a nameless pile of lumber unearthed in yet another of the government’s dredging projects.

The city of Galle lies on the strategic southwestern tip of Sri Lanka. This location made it prized by the country’s European occupiers. First the Portuguese came, building a fort on a cliff high above the sea, with sweeping views from its ramparts across the Indian Ocean. Then the Dutch swept in and ruled for over a century. Finally the British added what was then called Ceylon as a coda to their East India empire. They all made use of the fort and today within its walls is a bustling town bearing the remnants of all three of its former occupiers, in varying states of charming decay: buildings with Mediterranean tiled roofs line dusty streets with Dutch names and distinctly English hotels. Galle Fort is peopled with descendants of all three occupiers, living side by side with local Sinhalese fishermen and Muslim shop owners.

Over its long history, Galle Harbor would have seen any number of its former occupiers’ ships that called on the nearby fort. As he peered through the swirling cloud of silt, Tusker wondered, was this half-buried wooden spine a Portuguese barquentine? A Dutch frigate perhaps? Or just a lowly fishing boat?

Tusker’s six-month stint in Sri Lanka as a visiting professor of marine archaeology meant investigating the glamorous as well as the decidedly less so. A sample of the wood poking up through the thick clay sea bed from this nameless vessel, sent to the lab in Colombo, could help pin down its age and possibly its origin. But something more substantial—a piece of china, a windlass, an anchor—would be more conclusive.

Tusker looked up from his tedious excavating. Through the haze he made out the silhouette of Upali, swimming just above the sea floor ten yards away, jabbing the sand with a long rod. Tusker nodded to him and Upali returned the gesture with a pinkie and thumb “shaka” hand signal. It was typically upbeat for Upali, who made even the most mundane work seem fun.

Upali Karuna worked for the Sri Lankan Ministry of Culture, History, and Archaeology, or “MOCHA.” They’d gone to school together at Michigan Tech, just about as antipodal as you could get from the perpetually sweaty hug that was Sri Lanka. It was Upali who’d invited Tusker to Sri Lanka for a visiting fellowship, and he who had given him his nickname, a play on his last name, but also a reference to the elephants of Upali’s homeland that grew big ivory. Julian latched onto it after a lifetime of hating the first name his parents had cursed him with.

After graduating, Upali had gone on to get a Ph.D. at the University of Miami and then returned to his native Sri Lanka to teach and dive, before finally settling into a director’s job with MOCHA. He liked to joke that he’d invited Tusker to Sri Lanka this year as “payback” for the long winters in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the frigid dives they’d done in the Great Lakes. “I’ll keep your drysuit for you,” Tusker had told him when he left. “You know you’re going to miss it.” That was over a decade ago and Upali had still never returned. Meanwhile, Tusker stayed on, becoming faculty at Michigan Tech, teaching underwater archaeology there, and using the plentiful shipwrecks of the Great Lakes as his classroom. As he liked to tell Upali, “It's unsalted and there are no sharks.”

Tusker turned back to the task at hand. Two months of surveying and digging had exposed a good deal of the wooden structure, but there was much to be done and work would continue long after he returned to the States. He peered at his wristwatch, a huge, old Aquastar Benthos. It was a gift from his father, who’d worn it during his stint as a support diver on the U.S. Navy’s Tektite project in the early ‘70s. Its timing ring was faded and its case had a dent, but Tusker had faithfully kept it serviced since his father’s death and it never left his wrist. He never wore a modern dive computer unless he really needed its additional functionality.

The watch’s bright orange hand showed that 45 minutes had passed since their last tank swap. When he finished with this one, they’d break for lunch. Then Ian Walsh, the salty expat Brit, would swap places with Upali underwater.

Twenty minutes later, Tusker’s tank was down to 200 psi. Time for lunch. He banged on his tank to get Upali’s attention and gave the thumbs up “ascend” signal. Upali signaled back with an “OK” and started to ascend. Tusker slowly lifted off the sea bed, following Upali to the surface.

“‘Bout