Shadow Divers (24 page)

The divers shook hands and called it a night. Later that evening, at around midnight, Kohler tiptoed out of bed and into his kitchen. He found Chatterton’s phone number stuck to the refrigerator door. It was too late to call. He dialed anyway.

“John, it’s Richie. Listen, man, I’m sorry for calling so late. . . . When I was at National Archives, I came across some photos.”

Kohler described the pictures he had seen: of a U-boat man’s arm lying on the deck of an American ship—just his arm—with his tattoo still clear as day on his biceps; of a smiling British seaman holding a bucket of guts with a caption that said something like, “10 feet of human intestines; one human lung recovered from debris of sunken U-boat”; of a human liver next to a chocolate tin from a German mess kit. He told Chatterton he had been reading about U-boats for a long time and that for some reason, he’d had this pretty little picture about how a submarine sinks—that it cracks, starts dropping, the crewmen scratch once or twice, and then everyone drowns quietly. Now he told Chatterton that he knew better. He said these pictures got him thinking about the guys on their U-boat, and he asked Chatterton what he thought the sailors were thinking in the thirty seconds before their world blew up.

Chatterton told Kohler he’d been seeing the same kinds of photos. He described one that showed thirty U-boat crewmen in a life raft reaching their arms out to the enemy ship that had just rammed them. He told of snapshots showing the horrific damage done to U-boats by depth charges. The worst part, he told Kohler, was that a lot of these photos were from late in the war, when these sailors had gone out in their submarines knowing they had almost no chance of returning home. He told Kohler he could not imagine what a man might be thinking then.

For a few moments there was only silence on the line. Then Kohler apologized for calling so late, and Chatterton told him that the call was no problem at all.

CHAPTER NINE

A HEAVY TOLL

T
HE SEASON’S FIRST TRIP
to the U-boat was scheduled for May 24, 1992. By now, the divers had taken to calling the wreck
U-Who,
but no one expected the mystery to last much longer. Especially Chatterton. In the off-season, between research trips to Washington, he had gone and messed with voodoo.

For decades, scuba divers had breathed good old-fashioned air from their tanks. In recent months, however, a group of cutting-edge warm-water divers had ditched air in favor of a mixture of oxygen, helium, and nitrogen known as “trimix.” These divers had not invented trimix; rather, they had taken military and commercial diving technology and then tinkered with it to suit their purposes. As Chatterton heard it, trimix offered a fantasyland of advantages over breathing air in deep water:

—  widened peripheral vision

—  sharpened motor skills and coordination

—  longer bottom times

—  shorter decompression times

—  reduced risk of oxygen toxicity and deep-water blackout

—  elimination of narcosis

Chatterton believed that any one of these benefits could revolutionize wreck diving in the Northeast. Together they could turn a wreck diver into a superhero. Imagine working the U-boat without the pounding, narrowing fear of narcosis—and being able to do it longer, better, and safer than ever. When a Florida diver offered a trimix workshop in New Jersey, Chatterton and Yurga rushed to sign up.

Kohler, however, stayed away. He, too, had heard about trimix. He believed that if something sounded too good to be true, it was. “This is witchcraft, it’s black magic,” he told Chatterton. “You’re going to ‘experiment’ at two hundred and thirty feet? Inside a U-boat? No one knows the effects of that gas on the brain or the body. You’re going to get bent. Or paralyzed. Or killed.”

Chatterton and Yurga attended anyway. The workshop was taught by Billy Deans, a Florida dive shop owner. For a fee of one hundred dollars, attendees received a loose-leaf binder with photocopied articles and tables. The principle behind using trimix—known as technical diving—struck Chatterton as sound. By replacing some nitrogen with helium, a diver could diminish his risk of nitrogen buildup—the culprit for so much of what goes wrong in air dives. The benefits were said to be quantum leaps in safety and productivity.

But there were potential downsides. First, there were no technical diving classes or certification agencies; a diver experimenting with this new art was on his own. Second, divers could make just one dive per day, not two as was customary, because the intricacies of off-gassing helium while topside were not fully understood. Third, because divers breathed a separate gas, called “nitrox,” during decompression, they had to add nitrox tanks to their rigs, thereby carrying more gear. Fourth, northeastern dive shops did not stock trimix; if a diver wanted the stuff, he had to mix it himself. Finally, there existed almost no dive tables to instruct a technical diver on how long to decompress; this, too, would be a matter of improvisation and experimentation.

When the workshop ended, Deans told Chatterton and Yurga, “If you guys go forward, you’ll be practically the only ones in your part of the country doing it. We don’t know exactly how this works in cold water. You’ll have to be pioneers.”

By now, Chatterton was willing to pioneer. He believed he was just a dive or two from pulling evidence of the
U-Who’
s identity from the wreck. He believed in his ongoing responsibility to the crewmen’s families and to history. He believed in looking beyond, and technical diving seemed the first true beyond since Cousteau.

Kohler feared for his friends’ lives. He begged them to reconsider—so much productive diving had already been done on the wreck, why risk it? He warned Chatterton that mixing such flammable gases under such high pressures could result in disaster—a single spark could cause an explosion or fire. Chatterton could only say, “When it comes to the U-boat, Richie, trimix is the future.”

In February, as the divers steadied themselves for the business of brewing their own trimix, word arrived from the Coast Guard: a fishing boat about a hundred miles off Atlantic City had pulled up a human body dressed in a diver’s dry suit and scuba tanks. The corpse’s face had been eaten away by scavengers, leaving just a brown, waxy substance over the skull. Five teeth remained attached to a dislocated lower jaw. The Coast Guard identified the corpse as Steve Feldman. His body had been recovered perhaps five miles from the U-boat. He had been missing since September.

In January 1992, Chatterton and Yurga set out to mix their own gas. They rented five-foot-tall bottles of helium and oxygen from the local industrial gas supplier and purchased high-pressure hoses, delicate connectors, and finely tooled pressure gauges. They would mix the gas in Chatterton’s garage. To give himself a chance at survival in case of an explosion, Chatterton would stand outside the garage and reach his left hand through the window to manipulate the valves. “I’m a righty,” he explained to Yurga. “If this thing blows, it’s better that I lose my left hand.”

For weeks, Chatterton mixed gases in his garage, reaching his left hand through the window, holding his breath, waiting for an explosion. Soon, he and Yurga were expert at preparing the mixture of 17 percent oxygen, 30 percent helium, and 53 percent nitrogen they hoped would revolutionize their diving. They purchased dive tables from an engineer who wrote them as a hobby—he was one of maybe three people in the country who even attempted it—then used imagination and daring to extrapolate those tables so that they might make two dives in a single day. They purchased new and larger scuba tanks. When the weather warmed, they took the new rigs with their newfangled gas and splashed in a Pennsylvania quarry, adjusting buoyancy, tweaking rigging, and learning to breathe the magic gas. In the quarry’s shallows, their minds remained crystal clear, their coordination precise. The bottom of the Atlantic, however, would be another matter. And the inside of a sunken U-boat another matter still.

On the evening of May 23, 1992, divers gathered at the
Seeker
for the season’s first trip to the
U-Who.
Backs were slapped, new gear inspected, off-season stories swapped. Everyone asked trimix questions of Chatterton and Yurga. They always answered the same way: “Yes, I think we’ll live.” Kohler was among the last to show. Next to Chatterton’s new rig, Kohler looked as if he’d stolen his gear from the 1958 set of the television show
Sea Hunt.
On his back were the skull and crossbones of the Atlantic Wreck Divers.

“You’re a dinosaur, Kohler!” Chatterton yelled from the boat.

“Maybe,” Kohler shot back, taking in the sight of Chatterton’s new gas, “but I ain’t heading toward extinction.”

A few minutes later, Nagle emerged. Few had seen the
Seeker’
s owner since the end of last season, when he had vowed to quit drinking and work himself into diving shape. It took a moment for the divers to process the sight. Nagle’s skin was spotted with jaundice, his hair greasy, his body like a rumpled suit on a wire hanger. He smelled bad. He had brought along no dive gear. People scurried to avoid staring.

The rumble of the
Seeker’
s diesels was comfort to these divers, who never slept quite as well at home as they did on these thin, stained blue pads that delivered them to where they belonged. In the wheelhouse, Nagle and Chatterton took turns steering. Chatterton updated Nagle on the two favorites
—U-158
and
U-851—
and how Crowell and Yurga planned to measure the wreck and search for evidence of a deck gun, two simple tests that would pronounce on these original theories. Nagle stared straight ahead, the liquor spots on his face lit red by the instruments. For several minutes he said nothing.

“The
Seeker
is bigger than me,” Nagle said finally. “Diving is bigger than me. The
Seeker
will go on long after I’m gone.”

Chatterton said nothing. Ocean mist spattered the windshield. Nagle continued to steer a course for the
U-Who,
the greatest shipwreck a diver could ever find.

The divers awoke the next morning to a glorious day. The sun shone and the ocean was glass. Bottom visibility, they speculated, would be one hundred feet at least. Chatterton and Kohler began dressing. They had decided weeks ago to dive together and now rehearsed their plans. According to Chatterton’s research, torpedo-tube hatches—the circular doors that swung closed after a torpedo had been loaded into its firing chamber—contained on their faces a tag bearing the U-boat’s number. On his first dive, Chatterton would slither through the sub and into the forward torpedo room, videotaping his navigation for study topside. On the second dive, he would return, penetrate to the end of the torpedo room, and remove the tags from the hatches. With any luck, the tags would reveal the wreck’s identity. The plan was classic Chatterton: tape, study, and return. For his part, Kohler planned to explore the stern, searching the aft torpedo room for torpedo-hatch tags and any other useful artifacts. Measuring the wreck would be left to Danny Crowell. Yurga would search for evidence of a deck gun. By day’s end, mysteries would be solved.

Chatterton and Kohler splashed just after sunrise. Neither had seen the Atlantic so still and limpid, as if the ocean had dressed for this promising day. Chatterton’s trimix flowed into his lungs and brain as theory had promised, keeping his thinking sharp and the enemy narcosis at bay. At 100 feet, in this miraculous visibility, they could see the submarine end to end. But for the mortal wound to its side it looked ready for war, an eel of steel, torpedoes, and guns, still stealthy and deadly. Before this, Chatterton and Kohler had seen only twenty-foot patches of the wreck in the swirling ocean. Now they saw a war machine. The divers descended farther. At 150 feet, the cataclysm of the U-boat’s final moments screamed from the gaping hole in the control room. Only now, in such pristine visibility, could the full extent of the violence done to this U-boat be digested. Chatterton and Kohler looked at each other. Each mouthed the words “Oh, Christ.”

The divers continued to the wreck and secured the grapple. Chatterton remained astounded at his clarity of vision and nimbleness of hand. He felt no narcosis. Kohler watched him for signs of delirium or other symptoms that might occur when one dabbles in the black arts. Chatterton smiled and gave him the okay. The divers went their separate ways.

Chatterton made his way into the control room, through the commander’s quarters, and into the noncommissioned officers’ quarters. Again he saw piles of human remains—skulls, femurs, ribs, shins. This time, after a winter’s research, he felt a connection to the bones, as if he were returning to the home of a family he had known. He had read crewmen’s letters and had seen their faces in photographs as they drowned on sinking lifeboats. For the first time, Chatterton felt as if the men might not mind his efforts to find their names.

Chatterton corkscrewed himself through more obstructions, dodging hanging wire and jagged metal until he arrived at the forward torpedo room. Breathing trimix, he felt invincible and was tempted to push through and go right for the identifying tags he believed were attached to the torpedo tubes. But he stuck to his plan and videotaped the inside of the room, knowing that the camera would catch navigational traps worthy of topside study. After a few minutes of filming, he turned back, made his way out of the wreck, and ascended to the surface.

At the stern, Kohler worked into the aft torpedo room and began to search for artifacts. As before in this place, he saw a femur, then a skull and several other bones. Last year, the sight of these remains had thrown a cold chill through Kohler. This year, after he’d burrowed into the lives of the U-boat men, the room began pulsing. As Kohler looked at the skull and bones he could envision the checked bedsheets on which the sailors had slept, and he could hear the singing of their songs.

Kohler spent twenty minutes searching for clues but found nothing. Back on board the
Seeker,
he and Chatterton compared notes. Each had been in the water for about ninety minutes. Chatterton’s trimix, however, had enabled him to stay on the wreck for thirty minutes, while Kohler had stayed only twenty-two before needing to decompress.

“It was like diving in the Caribbean, Richie,” Chatterton said. “Clear head. Sharp motor skills. No narcosis.”

“I’ll stick with the stuff that got me here, thank you,” Kohler replied.

By this time, Crowell was preparing to splash and measure the wreck, and Yurga was dressed and ready to dive for evidence of a deck gun. Yurga had brought along a customer from the dive shop where he worked, a personable emergency-room physician named Lew Kohl, who had also outfitted himself to breathe trimix.

“You sure about him?” Chatterton whispered to Yurga.

“He’s used trimix on some shallower dives this year. He says he’s ready. And I’ll be diving with him,” Yurga replied.

Kohl adjusted his mask, bit down on his regulator, and flopped sideways off the gunwale. Chatterton and Kohler could not believe what happened next. Rather than bob to the surface as most divers do after the splash, Kohl plummeted like an anchor toward the ocean bottom. The topside divers knew at once what had happened: Kohl had not adjusted the buoyancy for his new trimix equipment. He had become what divers called a “dirt dart.”

Dirt darts were in deep shit. The furious increase in water pressure that came with their plunge squeezed their suits into a second skin. Rapid compression caused their regulators to free-flow, exploded their sinuses and blood vessels, burst their eardrums, and induced vomiting and vertigo. And that was before they hit the bottom.

“Oh, shit, he’s gone,” Kohler said. “Lew Kohl’s dead.”

But Chatterton could see that Kohl had landed and was still breathing—he could see his bubbles. Chatterton’s mind slowed to 16 rpm, the speed of the Vietnam medic under pressure.

“Look at his bubbles. He’s wandering around looking for the wreck, which means he’s alive,” Chatterton said. “Yurga, I’m going to give you a line. Follow his bubbles and go get him.”