Shadow Divers (25 page)

“John, this is too dangerous,” Yurga said. “This is my first trimix dive and—”

“I’m going to give you a line that I’ll have with me up here at all times. Richie and I cannot get back in the water now. You must go in the water, follow his bubbles, and get him.”

Yurga splashed. As he spiraled downward around Kohl’s bubbles, Kohl managed to drop his weight belt. Now positively buoyant, he began to ascend. At 150 feet, however, he ran out of gas—nothing was coming from his regulator. At that point, he lost interest in proper dive protocol. Kohl decided to rocket toward sunshine. Seconds later he broke the surface.

“Now he’s a Polaris missile!” Kohler shouted. “He’s gonna be bent for sure if he lives.”

Kohl began flailing and thrashing on the surface. But he was not vomiting or trembling, evidence to Chatterton that he had not yet been seriously bent.

“He’s only been in the water maybe ten minutes,” Chatterton yelled. “He’s got a chance.”

Kohl was not able to swim. Tom Packer and Steve Gatto dived into the ocean, dragged him up the ladder, and put him on the dressing table. “Get me a stethoscope and the crash kit,” Chatterton ordered. Kohler cut off Kohl’s dry suit. Chatterton took Kohl’s vital signs and began recording dive and medical information doctors would later need. As he made notes, he asked flatly, “Lew, are you in pain? Lew, can you hear me?”

Kohl could not respond. Chatterton told Nagle to call the Coast Guard rescue chopper. He shoved aspirins down Kohl’s throat, forced him to drink massive amounts of water to reduce the gas volume in his blood, and put an oxygen mask over his face. He used the stethoscope to listen for the gurgling of an embolism in Kohl’s blood vessels. A minute later, Kohl began to come around, almost as if he had been reanimated in a mad doctor’s laboratory.

“Lew, we’re calling a helicopter for you,” Chatterton said.

“Oh, no, don’t do that,” Kohl replied. “I’m fine. I’m coming around. I’m not even symptomatic—”

“You’re fine for the moment,” Chatterton said. “But we’re treading water here with this aspirin and oxygen. You’re going to become bent. You can’t do what you did without problems. We gotta get you to a hospital.”

Chatterton shined a flashlight into Kohl’s eyes.

“I see no signs of neurological damage,” Chatterton said. “But you’re gonna be bent. It’s just a matter of time.”

The divers continued to comfort Kohl and keep him stable on oxygen and water. With each minute, Kohl seemed better and healthier. Several minutes passed. Nagle poked his head from the wheelhouse and announced that a Coast Guard chopper was en route.

“Ah, jeez, I’m really sorry, guys,” Kohl said. “Everyone’s trip is on me. I pick up the tab for everyone.”

Chatterton smiled and allowed another diver to stay with Kohl for a while. He then moved to the back of the
Seeker
to help Yurga climb aboard. Still about two hundred feet from the stern of the boat, Yurga waved to Chatterton. Chatterton began to wave back, but his arm froze. Stalking Yurga from behind was an eighteen-foot monster.

“Shark!” Chatterton yelled. “Yurga! Behind you! Shark!”

Yurga whirled around just as the shark submerged.

“What?” Yurga yelled. “I don’t see anything!”

The shark surfaced again, moving closer to Yurga.

“Shark! Behind you!” Chatterton yelled.

Again, Yurga turned. Again, the shark submerged.

“Quit busting my balls!” Yurga screamed. “Come on. Get serious!”

Now, even as the shark bore down, Chatterton could not help laughing.

“Swim, Charlie, swim!” he screamed, quoting a line from the movie
Jaws.

Yurga swam. The shark followed. Yurga swam with all he had. The shark finally turned away and disappeared.

Nagle cut the anchor line and headed to meet the Coast Guard helicopter. Kohl continued to improve. The chopper took him away. He would suffer joint pain as a result of the bends but would recover fully. Most likely, only his relatively brief time on the ocean bottom saved him; had he stayed down longer and then shot to the surface without decompressing, his adventure as a dirt dart probably would have killed him. The divers, however, had lost the most perfect day any of them had ever seen. Crowell had never had a chance to measure the wreck. Yurga hadn’t checked for a deck gun. And Chatterton hadn’t gone inside the torpedo room to get his tags. The season, however, was young. That was another thing about wreck diving. So long as you were alive, there would always be another trip.

Nagle booked the next
U-Who
trip for June 9, 1992. Dr. Kohl had seen enough of the U-boat for one lifetime. He was replaced by two divers unlike any Chatterton and Kohler had known before.

Chris Rouse, thirty-nine, and Chrissy Rouse, twenty-two, were father and son, though with their identical wiry builds and Mediterranean features, the men were often mistaken for brothers. Smiling, they almost appeared to be twins, their pupils turning leprechaun under dark eyebrow forests of naughtiness. They smiled a lot. They argued even more.

The Rouses bickered incessantly, flinging insults, epithets, and crudities at the slightest provocation—and preferably no provocation—no matter the place or occasion.

“The best part of you was the stain I left on the mattress,” Chris would say in front of a boat full of divers.

“You old fucking man, you can’t keep up with me,” Chrissy would reply.

“You’re lucky you got my good looks or you wouldn’t get anywhere with women,” Chris would say.

“Ah, you just got lucky with Mom, you old douche,” Chrissy would answer.

And on and on, until the Rouses came to be known as the Bickers. Some divers were horrified by the exchanges. Many more were entertained. Chatterton and Kohler watched in amazement.

Yet the Rouses were excellent divers. They had made their bones as cave divers, a branch of scuba known for its meticulous and unrelenting safety training. Cavers often shunned wreck diving because of its unpredictability and harsh conditions, but the Rouses were drawn to wrecks for the history to be uncovered and the artifacts to be taken. Cavers who challenged shipwrecks often did so stubbornly, refusing to warehouse their long-held mantras and techniques. The Rouses had no such issues. They were ravenous in seeking new skills and burned to apply them. Like many cavers, they had experience with technical diving and breathing trimix, and were eager to discuss theory and ideas.

When the Rouses hit water it was clear they were blood. They dove as a team and had developed a sixth sense between them, the kind of anticipation born of a lifetime of living under the same roof. Underwater they remained absolutely loyal, each willing to sacrifice himself for the good of the other. This single-mindedness—this love—made the Rouses perhaps the most formidable team in diving.

When Nagle invited the Rouses to join the
U-Who
expedition, Chrissy vowed to solve the mystery. He told Chatterton that by identifying the wreck he would immortalize the Rouse name and contribute a page of history to the world. His father did not bicker with him about this.

“They’re more than talented and capable enough to do it,” Chatterton told Kohler. “They may be the ones who get this done.”

The weather for the June trip was not nearly as perfect as it had been in May, but the divers’ plans remained the same. Chatterton would search the forward torpedo tubes for numbered tags. Kohler would hunt for identifying artifacts. Crowell would measure the wreck. Yurga would determine if the
U-Who
had been built with a deck gun. As for the Rouses, they would penetrate the wreck and begin to learn the U-boat.

As before, Chatterton and Kohler dove together and set the hook. This time, Kohler swam forward with Chatterton, his eyes scanning the areas where crewmen kept records and personal belongings. Chatterton moved through the forward section of the U-boat, into the torpedo room, and up against the torpedo-tube hatches. Where he had once seen nothing in this spot, he now saw a white, tag-shaped patch of encrustation on the hatch. He grabbed his knife and pried the blade under the encrustation. White flakes fell away, revealing the perfect outline of a tag. Except no tag remained. Corrosion had eaten away the metal so that only the imprint of the tag had survived. Chatterton’s heart sank. He inspected the other three torpedo-tube hatches. Same story. A half century of salt water and storms had gnawed away the answer. As Chatterton turned to end his dive he felt profoundly disappointed. He had developed concrete evidence for the tags’ existence and had designed a well-researched plan for their retrieval, only to find them eaten by nature.

Just behind Chatterton, Kohler was having better luck. While in the noncommissioned officers’ quarters he discovered a closetful of boots and shoes, still lined up neatly—left-right, left-right—just as the crewmen had left them. He took one of the boots, believing a crewman might have written his name inside. “It doesn’t look like you guys were wearing these, so I’m going to take one,” he explained to the roomful of remains around him.

Kohler moved next to the conning tower lying broken in the sand beside the U-boat. Inside, he discovered a bicycle-type seat. At once, he recognized the piece as the chair on which the commander sat while manning the attack periscope. “This might be where the commander died,” he told himself. “If this U-boat was attacking when it was sunk, this is where the guy would have been sitting.” The chair, however, bore no identifying marks, so Kohler left it alone. He met Chatterton on the anchor line. Each man shook his head. Neither had solved the mystery.

While Chatterton and Kohler decompressed, Crowell and Yurga set about their missions. To measure the wreck, Crowell attached one end of a surveyor’s tape measure to the U-boat’s bow, then swam aft, allowing the tape to unspool from its reel as he moved. He had affixed a tag to the tape at the 250-foot mark before leaving on this trip, the length of the typical Type IX. If this U-boat was any longer than that, it would be powerful evidence that the wreck was
U-851,
the rare Type IXD U-cruiser commanded by Merten’s rebel colleague Weingärtner.

Crowell allowed the line to unspool slowly as he began his journey along the wreck’s top. Line spun free of the reel. As the tip of the U-boat came into view, the reel hiccuped. Crowell looked down. His marker had come up. The wreck was about 250 feet long. U-cruisers were 287 feet long. This could not be
U-851.

While Crowell prepared to ascend, Yurga settled in just forward of the damaged control-room area. He had made a careful study of Type IX deck plans and knew exactly where to look for the deck gun mount, a known feature of
U-158,
the submarine commanded by the daring Erwin Rostin. Yurga crab-walked along the top of the wreck and envisioned the blueprints he had devoured like pulp-fiction novels during the off-season. He surveyed the relevant area. The evidence was plain as day: this U-boat had been built without a deck gun mount. This wreck could not be
U-158.
In the course of twenty minutes, the divers’ two leading theories had been sunk.

The men regrouped topside. Each seemed more shell-shocked than the next. A winter of intense research had come to naught. None of them could fathom any viable contenders other than the two they had just eliminated. They halfheartedly inspected the inside of the boot Kohler had recovered. As befitting the day, it contained no information. The Rouses surfaced soon after. Neither father nor son had found much of significance. Chatterton and Kohler made another dive but found little. As the boat headed back to Brielle, the divers knew that summer was upon them, meaning that Nagle would begin running the
Seeker
to the
Andrea Doria,
his money trips. None of them knew when the boat might again be available to take them to the
U-Who.

The day after returning from the
U-Who,
Chatterton wrote a letter to Karl-Friedrich Merten. He explained that divers had measured the wreck and determined that it could not be
U-851,
the boat Merten believed his colleague Weingärtner had commandeered to New York. Merten wrote back expressing gratitude for Chatterton’s efforts and acceptance of his conclusion. Chatterton did not phone Major Gregory Weidenfeld of the Civil Air Patrol; though the divers had ruled out
U-158,
they still allowed that the wreck might have fallen to the CAP.

For the next three months, Nagle ran to the
Doria,
and even when he had an open date for the
U-Who,
the weather interfered. Chatterton still could not believe that the sub’s torpedo-tube hatch tags, which he had thought were made of resilient brass, had been eaten away. He tracked down an elderly U-boat veteran in South Carolina who had also built U-boats in Germany’s naval yards. The man explained that as brass had become scarce, tags had been made of leftover materials, a metal stew that could not survive long in the marine environment. Chatterton thanked him for the information and began to say good-bye.

“One other thing, if I might,” the old U-boat man said.

“Of course. What is it?” Chatterton asked.

“Thank you for what you are doing. Thank you for caring about those boys down there. They don’t have anyone else.”

Caring for the fallen crewmen had figured into much of Chatterton’s and Kohler’s thinking since the last
U-Who
trip. Though neither spoke of it, a truth had begun pounding at their awareness: they would stand a far better chance of identifying the wreck by digging through the human remains. Many of the bones were still dressed in clothes, the pockets of which might contain wallets, coins, a personalized money clip, love letters, an engraved pocket watch, anything. Items like these survived for decades on shipwrecks. Frustrated and with no promising leads, Chatterton and Kohler fantasized about the answers that lay mixed among these bones.

Chatterton called Kohler and set up a meeting at Scotty’s Steakhouse, a popular nearby restaurant.

“You want to talk about the men, right?” Kohler asked.

“Right,” Chatterton said. “It’s time.”

The next evening, the divers sat down for rib eyes and baked potatoes. They discussed the prospect of digging through the crewmen’s remains. The bones appeared to be well preserved. Personal belongings were likely still among the bones. The only question was how to deal with those remains. Each man announced his decision.