Shadow Divers (12 page)

As Chatterton made his way up the anchor line, the next divers reached the wreck. Skibinski and Feldman got inside the hole near the fallen conning tower and began searching the debris. Skibinski found a foot-long tubular piece of equipment he believed might be inscribed with a serial number. For the next several minutes, both he and Feldman dug in earnest, enthralled by the magnitude of promising debris. But both men had sworn to start up the anchor line after just fourteen minutes, no matter how tempting the exploration. Skibinski’s watch read thirteen minutes. He tapped Feldman on the shoulder and pointed up. Feldman nodded his okay. Skibinski headed for the anchor line and began his ascent. It had taken discipline to leave such a wellspring of artifacts, but the men had stuck to their conservative plan.

As Skibinski ascended he glanced down for Feldman, who appeared to be examining something on the wreck. “He better stop digging and get his ass up here,” Skibinski grumbled through his regulator before ascending another few feet. He looked down again, and this time he noticed that there were no bubbles coming from Feldman’s regulator. Narcosis started to hum in the background of his mind. “Something’s not right,” Skibinski told himself. “I gotta go down there and check.” He dropped down the anchor line to his friend.

Skibinski grabbed Feldman and turned him around. Feldman’s regulator fell from his mouth. His eyes were not blinking. Skibinski looked deeper into his friend’s mask, but Feldman just kept staring back, he would not blink,
a man had to blink, goddamn it, please blink, Steve.
Nothing. Skibinski screamed through his regulator, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” while the jungle drums of narcosis began their stampede and he tried to replace the regulator in Feldman’s mouth but that mouth just hung open, which confirmed that Feldman wasn’t breathing and Skibinski screamed, “Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck!” and Feldman only kept staring at him and Skibinski’s head pounded harder and he breathed harder, which made the needle on his air supply drop.

Skibinski wrapped his left arm around Feldman. Questions whizzed through his brain: Should I inflate Feldman’s suit with air and shoot him to the surface? Can’t do that, the bends would kill him. Should I leave Feldman behind and ensure my own safe and controlled decompression? Can’t abandon a friend, can’t abandon a friend, can’t abandon a friend. Only one option remained: he would carry Feldman with him to the surface. Sometimes unconscious divers snapped out of it with ascent; he had definitely heard about that.

Still negatively buoyant, Feldman was lead in Skibinski’s arm. Skibinski pulled with all he had, gulping air as he one-armed himself and his friend up the anchor line, Feldman arched back in the current, arms dangling at his sides, legs slightly apart, eyes staring straight ahead. With each pull Skibinski grew wearier and sucked more air. He made it to 170 feet, 165 feet, 160. Then he saw two divers, Brennan and Roberts, above him coming down.

Skibinski released the anchor line to rest for just a moment. Instantly, he and Feldman began to drift away in the current. Skibinski, knowing that he was burning air and could go lost at sea in a matter of seconds, began kicking furiously to regain the anchor line, thrashing against the current until he could no longer maintain a grip on his friend. He let go of Feldman. The limp diver began sinking rapidly, all the while on his back and staring up, his mouth moving open and closed but no bubbles coming out.

Instinctively, Roberts bolted for the body, but Feldman kept sinking. Roberts knew that by leaving the anchor line and chasing this diver he could go lost himself. But it was a reaction—he could not allow another man to drop into the abyss. At around 200 feet, Roberts thrust out his arm and caught hold of Feldman’s harness, but the leaden diver was so heavy that both men continued to plummet toward the sand. Roberts righted himself and began searching desperately for Feldman’s buoyancy compensator or dry-suit inflation valve—if he could pump air into Feldman’s equipment he might better carry him toward the surface. But Feldman was a morass of equipment, and Roberts could not find any inflation gear under all his stuff. Roberts pumped his own suit full of air, but even that did not arrest the duo’s plummet. Both divers hit bottom together. Narcosis began to bang inside Roberts. He looked into Feldman’s face. He saw no life. He could not see the wreck. He could not see the anchor line. There was only sand in every direction. “We’re in the middle of nowhere,” he thought. “I’m in fucking never-never land. I’m lost.”

As Roberts sat on the bottom alongside Feldman, a panicked Skibinski regained the anchor line at about 160 feet. His eyes turned giant and he rushed toward Brennan, making the slashing-across-throat motion that indicates a diver is out of air. Brennan had seen the look before—this was panic, the snowball. Skibinski lunged for Brennan’s regulator. Brennan backed away; he could not allow Skibinski to kill them both. He reached behind him for his backup regulator and offered it to the thrashing Skibinski. Skibinski took it and started to gulp Brennan’s reserve. Brennan began to ascend with Skibinski, stopping with him to do brief decompression stops at 50 feet, 40 feet, all the while thinking, “If Doug’s still alive, he’s gotta be lost and freaked out. He’s alone down there risking his life to get a guy who’s already dead. I have a responsibility to Doug. I gotta go get Doug.” At around 30 feet, Brennan passed Skibinski off to another diver and bolted for the bottom to search for Roberts, thereby making himself a prime candidate to go lost.

Sitting in the sand with Feldman at ocean’s bottom, Roberts checked his gauges; he had burned 60 percent of his air supply struggling with Feldman. If he stayed much longer he would incur a decompression obligation beyond his remaining air. Feldman’s body lay next to him in the sand, mouth and eyes agape. Roberts’s peripheral vision narrowed with his crescendoing narcosis—he could now see only in front of him. He thought, “If I don’t get out of here fast, there will be two of us dead on the bottom.” The anchor line was nowhere in sight. He would have to swim for the surface, even though that meant that he would likely be blown miles from the
Seeker
by the time he surfaced. He could only pray that someone topside would see him bobbing on the waves before he went lost at sea and drowned.

Just before ascending, Roberts began to tie a line to Feldman. That way, if anyone found his body, they could find Feldman, too. He strained to wrap the line around Feldman, but his motor skills were blunted and he could not make a good knot. He tried again. Finally, he secured the line and began his ascent.

Roberts did not know exactly how long he had been on the bottom. He ascended. At 100 feet the first trickles of light began to spackle the ocean around him, and he saw a miracle. Somehow, in his ascent, he had been blown back into the
Seeker
’s anchor line, a huge long shot. He tied the thin nylon rope that led to Feldman to the anchor line, then improvised a decompression stop. Brennan reached him moments later. The two of them made their way to the surface.

Brennan climbed aboard the
Seeker
first. Chatterton and Nagle saw him coming up the ladder and figured something was wrong—he had been in the water only a short time.

“There’s a problem,” Brennan said, pulling off his mask. “There’s a guy dead on the wreck. I think it’s Feldman.”

Chatterton called to Steve Lombardo, a physician who had yet to splash, and asked him to stand by. Nagle rushed down from the wheelhouse. A few minutes later Skibinski climbed the ladder. As he reached the top rung, he pulled off his face mask and began sobbing, “He’s dead! He’s dead!” Then, before anyone could assist him, he pitched forward and fell face-first onto the
Seeker
’s wooden deck, a three-foot fall. Chatterton, Nagle, and Lombardo rushed to the mumbling diver, believing he might have broken his neck. They moved Skibinski gingerly, trying to remove his gear. Skibinski could only say, “He’s dead! I couldn’t breathe! My regulator! He’s dead!” Chatterton removed the diver’s hood. Skibinski was covered in vomit.

“Paul, listen to me,” Chatterton said. “Did you do your deco?”

“I don’t know . . .”

“You must answer me,” Chatterton said. “Did you do your deco?”

“Steve’s dead!” Skibinski cried before vomiting again.

“DID YOU DO YOUR DECO?”

Skibinski managed to nod confirmation that he had decompressed.

Roberts surfaced next.

“Feldman’s down there! You gotta go get him!” he yelled.

Chatterton did not move. He studied Roberts’s face.

“Come on, get going!” Roberts yelled at Chatterton. “Feldman is down there!”

Chatterton noticed blood on Roberts’s face. His medic instincts took over. “Let me look in your mask,” Chatterton ordered. “You might have embolized.”

Chatterton took the mask. It was full of blood. Roberts coughed up more blood through his mouth and nose. Someone yelled, “Get a chopper!” Chatterton retracted into a new level of calm. He looked deeply into Roberts’s mouth and nose; the bleeding had stopped.

“I think he busted a blood vessel,” Chatterton said. “There’s no embolism. Give him oxygen as a precaution. We don’t need a chopper.”

As he breathed oxygen and settled down, Roberts confirmed that Feldman had been without a regulator for close to thirty minutes, that he had tied Feldman to the line from his reel, and that the reel was now tied to the anchor line at about 100 feet.

Chatterton gathered Nagle and Danny Crowell.

“Before we do anything, we have to get everyone back on the boat and make sure everyone’s okay—no injuries, no nervous breakdowns,” Chatterton said. “Then we have to go get the body.”

“Who’s going to go?” Nagle asked.

“Danny and I will go,” Chatterton said. “We’re crew. We’ll go get him.”

Crowell nodded. He and Chatterton figured they would have to wait another two hours before they had off-gassed enough nitrogen from their first dives to return safely to the water. Nagle returned to the wheelhouse and locked the door. He had his own decision to make.

Coast Guard rules required boat captains to radio immediately whenever a diver went missing. But nothing said that a captain had to drop everything to radio news of a dead diver. Ordinarily, Nagle or any other captain would have called in Feldman’s death straightaway; it was the decent thing to do and would expedite the Coast Guard’s mandatory investigation. Nagle just stared at his radios. If he called the Coast Guard now, hours before Chatterton and Crowell could even attempt to recover Feldman’s body, he would be broadcasting the wreck’s location to every boat and seaman in a thirty-mile radius, any of whom could use a direction finder to zero in on and steal the wreck site. Worse, he believed that Bielenda had moles in the Coast Guard; if he revealed the location—now or ever—it would be just a matter of time before Bielenda raided the submarine and stole the
Seeker
’s glory.

Nagle made a plan. He would radio the Coast Guard only when the
Seeker
was ready to pull up anchor and head back to shore. Even then, he would give them just an approximate location of the accident. “Why the hell do they need to know exactly where this happened?” he reasoned. “They aren’t coming out here one way or the other for a dead guy.” He left the wheelhouse without touching the radios.

Two hours after Skibinski surfaced, Chatterton and Crowell geared up and went to get Feldman. At around 100 feet they found Roberts’s line tied to the anchor line. Feldman should be attached to the line at the bottom of the ocean. Chatterton descended to retrieve the body. He reached the bottom. Connected to the line were Feldman’s mask and snorkel, but no body.

Chatterton knew what had happened: in the tunnel vision and slowed motor skills of narcosis, Roberts had tied the line to Feldman’s head instead of to his harness or tanks. As the current had tumbleweeded Feldman across the sand, the line had slipped over his head, caught on his mask and snorkel, and come free. Feldman was still somewhere on the ocean bottom. Chatterton and Crowell, however, were out of time and could not continue to search for him. They returned to the boat and gathered the other divers.

“Listen,” Chatterton said. “We gotta go down and try to find this guy. He was negatively buoyant, so we know he’s not floating on the surface somewhere. He’s in the sand and he’s off the wreck. I don’t know that we can find him. But we gotta look.”

The divers held their breath, hoping Chatterton would not say what he said next.

“We gotta do sand sweeps.”

Wreck diving offers few more dangerous propositions than the sand sweep. The technique is simple enough: a diver ties a line from his penetration reel to the wreck, then backs up in the direction of the current. When he reaches a distance of, say, twenty feet, he walks a 180-degree arc in the sand, searching for scallops or artifacts—or lost divers. If the search is fruitless, the diver lets out more line, backs up farther, and sweeps a bigger arc. The diver’s life depends on his line. If he loses the line—if it gets cut on debris or slips from his grip or frays against the wreck—he is gone, a nomad in a featureless landscape without any direction back to the wreck. He then must free-ascend, risking a sloppy decompression and the likelihood that he will surface miles from the dive boat and go lost at sea.

Chatterton asked for volunteers. It was no small request. The day was getting late and everyone’s nerves were shot, a petri dish for narcosis. And no one could help Feldman, anyway.

Many divers still had two or three hours of off-gassing obligation and could not get back into the water before dark. Nagle was in no physical condition to dive. That left just four or five candidates.

Brennan shook his head.

“The guy’s already dead,” he told Chatterton. “I’m not getting bent or going lost to help a dead guy. I already almost drowned from Skibinski panicking, and I cut my deco short. The current is whipping now. There’s nothing I can do for the guy. I’m not risking my life.”

Chatterton would not risk sending Roberts back into the water. Skibinski was an emotional wreck. John Hildemann and Mark McMahon stepped forward. They would do the sweeps. Hildemann would go first—he was the only diver who had not yet been in the water. If necessary, McMahon would follow.