“It’s a dive helmet!” he shouted, recognizing the famous maker of commercial diving gear. This was a saturation diver’s helmet, no question, and not the kind used for salvaging wrecks long ago. No, this was the kind of helmet seen on modern commercial divers welding oil pipeline and laying cable in the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico… or Batticaloa harbor.

Upali’s skin went cold. The Depth Charge. That explained the fresh hole in the hull, the doused running lights, the nighttime anchorage. Were they cutting up the Vampire for her higher carbon steel, which would fetch millions on the market? But that sort of clandestine poaching was typically done by ill-outfitted amateurs in shallower waters, not a commercial diving company in over 300 feet of water. He’d have to report this to the police. No—the Sri Lankan Navy.

“All right, shut her down,” he said. “Let’s get back. We may have gotten into something a little deeper than our old shipwreck.”

Night Moves

Bay of Bengal, one mile offshore of Batticaloa. 2:48am the next morning.

The Zodiac bounced across the light swells, following the coastline. The two men in the Depth Charge’s rigid inflatable said nothing to each other, even as the sound of the motor raised a nearby school of dolphins, which arced out of the water as if to play. Scholz glanced at their silvery backs and then turned away again, training his eyes forward. To the west, the Batticaloa lighthouse stood impotent in the dark, its light long since extinguished.

The man at the back cut the outboard motor and the boat coasted to a sloshing stop. The only sound now was the distant roar of the surf breaking over the sandbar at the entrance of the lagoon. The handsome white cruiser lay at anchor ahead of them, about 200 yards away, a single white light atop its cabin illuminated for safety.

Scholz, perched at the bow of the Zodiac, was almost sure no one would be aboard at this hour, but he pulled a night vision scope out of a black duffel and scanned just to be certain. He tossed it back in the bag and nodded to the man at the motor, who wore a thin black rash guard of the type tropical surfers wore for sun protection. But here, in the wee hours of a Sri Lankan morning, he wore it for a different reason. In the humid air, his face glistened with sweat.

Scholz, who was wearing a black, two-millimeter hooded wetsuit, pulled on a pair of Scubapro Jet Fins and spat into a diving mask. He rubbed the glass with two fingers to keep it from fogging, rinsed it in the sea, hoisted an aluminum scuba cylinder and harness onto the Zodiac’s gunwale, secured his mask, bit down on his regulator’s mouthpiece, and backrolled into the water with only a small splash. He’d done this sort of thing before.