The bomb was now above him, slightly buoyant under its lift bags. McElroy looked around through the settling silt, trying to get his bearings. The funhouse effect of the tilted shipwreck played tricks with his perception and he tried to slow his breathing to reorient himself.

He'd lost traction on the loose debris in the steeply pitched bilge and slid 15 feet to what had been the far bulkhead of the bomb room. How did I fall so far? He felt his heavily booted foot wedged between a row of pipes that somehow had remained mounted to the bulkhead. His umbilical was stretched taut, fouled on something, making his maneuvering more difficult. He gave his foot a twist, first one way, then the other. The boot didn’t budge an inch.

Aitkens peered through the gap in the ship’s hull. The interior of the wreck was now zero visibility, the silt McElroy had dislodged billowing out of the hole in the hull in a slow moving cloud.

“I need to go help McElroy,” Aitkens said, now also in a mild panic.

“Don’t concern yourself with McElroy!” Rausing’s voice was pitched now. “Your job is to secure the cargo!”

But by now there was no chance of finding either the bomb or McElroy in the whiteout. Aitkens perched, paralyzed by indecision and growing fear, listening to McElroy’s struggling through the radio in his helmet. It sounded as though he was hyperventilating, dangerous at this depth, breathing heliox.

“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.