“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.