Shadow Divers (29 page)

“Hey, Chris,” Yurga yelled. “Your kid keeps missing the ocean!”

Finally, Chrissy made it over the gunwale, his father followed, and their dive was under way. It took just a minute or two before the team hit the wreck and made their way from the anchor line to the opening gouged in the control-room area. There, Chrissy unfastened the two small stage bottles he would breathe from on his ascent and laid them on the U-boat’s deck. Next, he clipped one end of a nylon line to the torn-open entrance of the U-boat and slithered into the wreck, allowing the line to unspool from a reel attached to his harness. This way, even if the visibility dropped to zero or he became lost or disoriented, he could follow the line out of the U-boat and back to his father. Cave divers like the Rouses called this technique “running a line” and made it their religion. Wreck divers, however, did not believe in depending on nylon lines—or anything else—that could become tangled or cut inside a wreck’s jagged guts.

It took Chrissy just a minute or two to snake into the galley and begin his work. The pillowcase-sized piece of canvas he had worked on for so long still lay buried under the skeleton of a floor-to-ceiling cabinet made of heavy-gauge steel. Chrissy could not hope to move the massive cabinet. To free the artifact he would have to dig beneath the cabinet into the rotting debris until enough space had been cleared to pull the canvas out. For perhaps fifteen minutes, Chrissy burrowed with his hands, creating a silt tornado that blackened the room and dropped the visibility to zero. He kept digging and pulling. The canvas began to loosen from beneath the cabinet. Chrissy pulled harder. Mushroom clouds of silt exploded within the compartment. The jungle drums beat louder. He pulled again. More canvas came free, then even more, and it kept coming, like the scarves in a magician’s trick, while the drums pounded louder and Chrissy grew closer to solving the mystery. Perhaps just seconds remained in the dive. Chrissy pulled again. The steel cabinet, now deprived of its bottom support, began to collapse, hurtling several hundred pounds of steel atop Chrissy’s head and burying his face in the hole he had dug. Chrissy tried to move. Nothing happened. He was trapped.

As the gravity of his situation sludged into Chrissy’s consciousness, the feral dog that is narcosis leaped from its cage and set upon him with fangs fully bared. His head throbbed. His mind narrowed. He believed, more certainly than he knew his name, that a monster was on top of him, pinning him. He tried again to move but could not—in its collapse, the cabinet had wedged between other debris and had become part of an interlocking sarcophagus atop the diver. Outside, Chris checked his watch and saw that his son was overdue. He had not planned to penetrate the U-boat. He was unfamiliar with the area in which Chrissy was working. He swam into the wreck.

Chris reached his son and began working to free him from the trap. Chrissy struggled to climb out but only burned faster through his remaining air and deepened his narcosis. Chris kept working. Finally, after several minutes, Chrissy came free of the cabinet. Father and son now needed to exit the wreck. Chrissy checked his watch. It read thirty minutes. He and his father were ten minutes over on their time.

Ordinarily, the Rouses would have followed Chrissy’s nylon line out of the wreck and to the tanks they needed to breathe from to make their ascent. But in Chrissy’s struggle to free himself, the line had become tangled around the canvas until it was a morass of knots. Narcosis banged like an industrial press inside Chrissy’s brain, tunneling his peripheral vision and lighting the panic fuse of his instincts. He and his father swam in the direction of the control room and managed to exit the submarine through a crack between its skin and bulkhead. The tanks and the anchor line were now in front of the divers and just forty feet away. All the Rouses had to do was swim aft, locate the bottles, and begin their ascent. In the struggle, however, Chrissy had likely become disoriented and believed himself to be facing the wrong direction. He turned around and swam toward the bow—directly away from the tanks and anchor line. His father followed.

The Rouses searched frantically for their tanks. Chris, who had dropped only one of his stage bottles outside the wreck, gave the remaining one to Chrissy. A minute passed and the Rouses kept searching, but they were now 150 feet from their stage bottles and their narcosis was spiraling deeper by the second. Two minutes passed, then three, then five—still, they could not find their tanks. They searched for another five minutes, never knowing that they were turned around and nowhere near the stage bottles or anchor line. Chrissy checked his watch. He had been underwater for forty minutes. The Rouses were now twenty minutes over their dive time. Their required decompression, originally sixty minutes, had now expanded to two and a half hours. Neither had enough air to breathe for that long.

A clear-thinking diver breathing trimix likely would have used his remaining gas to eke out the best decompression possible. The Rouses, however, had made this trip without trimix and were breathing air. Chrissy, terrified at losing his stage bottles and lost on the wreck, made a decision that divers spend a lifetime dreading—to bolt for the surface. His father shot up after him. Nagle had a saying about divers who rocketed to the surface after so long down deep. “They’re already dead,” he would say. “They just don’t know it yet.”

The Rouses missiled toward the surface. At about 100 feet they intersected a miracle. Somehow, in their explosive ascent, they spotted the anchor line, swam to it, and held on. Now they had a chance. They could fashion a decompression from their remaining air, then switch to the oxygen tank the
Seeker
dangled at 20 feet for emergencies.

Chrissy switched from his main tanks to the stage bottle his father had given him. He sucked from the new tank and gagged—the mouthpiece had torn and was delivering water, not air. That was enough for Chrissy. He switched back to the main tanks on his back and bolted again for the surface. Again, his father followed. This time, Chrissy would stop for nothing.

In the
Seeker’
s wheelhouse, Chatterton, Kohler, and Crowell checked the weather and shivered—brutal seas and nasty winds were rolling in. A minute later they saw two divers pop to the surface about a hundred feet in front of the boat. Chatterton looked closer. He saw the hockey-type helmets of the Rouses. They had come up an hour ahead of schedule.

“Oh, Christ,” Chatterton said. “This ain’t good.”

Chatterton and Kohler tore down the wheelhouse steps and onto the
Seeker’
s bow. Chatterton raised his arm and put his fingertips on his head, the universal “Are you okay?” signal to divers. Neither man responded. Six-foot waves threw the divers closer to the boat. Chatterton and Kohler looked into the men’s faces. Both father and son had the wide, rapidly blinking eyes of the newly condemned.

“Did you complete your decompression?” Chatterton yelled.

Neither diver answered.

“Swim to the boat!” Chatterton yelled.

Chrissy moved his arms and inched closer to the
Seeker.
Chris also tried to swim, but he flopped sideways and half-kicked like a sick goldfish.

“Chrissy! Did you complete your decompression?” Chatterton pressed.

“No,” Chrissy managed to yell back.

“Did you come straight to the surface?”

“Yes,” Chrissy said.

Kohler went ashen at the answer. He remembered the Atlantic Wreck Divers’ mantra:
I would rather slit my throat than shoot to the surface without decompressing.

Chatterton grabbed two throw lines to fling to the Rouses. The
Seeker
rose and fell on the raging waves like a carnival ride, each undulation threatening to launch Chatterton and Kohler into the Atlantic. An eight-foot wave pushed Chrissy under the
Seeker
as her bow lifted off the ocean like an executioner’s ax. The
Seeker
fell from the darkening sky, Chrissy helpless to move away. Chatterton and Kohler held their breath. The boat’s splash rail hurtled downward and bashed the regulator on Chrissy’s tanks, just inches from his skull, splitting the brass mechanism and releasing an explosion of rushing air from the tanks. Chatterton threw the lines. Each of the Rouses managed to grab a rope. Chatterton and Kohler pulled the divers along the side of the boat, towing them out from under the
Seeker
and toward the stern. Crowell ran into the wheelhouse.

He radioed the Atlantic City Coast Guard repeatedly but got no reply.

“Fuck this,” he thought to himself. “I’m calling a Mayday.”

“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” Crowell called into his handheld microphone. “This is the vessel
Seeker.
Requesting immediate helicopter evacuation. We have injured divers. Please acknowledge.” The Brooklyn Coast Guard station responded. They were sending a chopper.

Chatterton, Kohler, and other divers continued to tow the Rouses toward the back of the boat as the
Seeker
’s bow rose and fell with thunderous booms. Chris came around nearest the ladder. Chatterton rushed toward him.

“Chris, get up the ladder!” Chatterton yelled.

“Take Chrissy first,” Chris grunted.

Chatterton began to insist but stopped himself when he looked into Chris’s widened eyes. In them, he saw only fear and knowing—the kind of knowing that occurs when one’s fate is certain and moments away.

“Okay, Chrissy, come up!” Chatterton yelled to the younger Rouse, who was holding on to a line about ten feet behind his father. The divers pulled Chrissy to the ladder. He screamed in pain.

“I can’t move my legs!” Chrissy yelled. “Monkeyfuck! Monkeyfuck! It hurts! It hurts so bad!”

Chatterton knew that serious decompression bends were already upon the divers. He and Kohler straddled the gunwale on either side of the ladder and put their arms under Chrissy, grabbing the underside of his tanks for leverage. The
Seeker
rose and fell with nature’s onrushing tantrum, each explosion against the ocean threatening to catapult the divers overboard and crush Chrissy under the stern. The lactic acid in Chatterton’s and Kohler’s muscles burned as they willed themselves to hang on to the stricken young diver. Between impacts, they managed to lug Chrissy up the ladder until he thudded onto the deck like a netted tuna.

“Get him onto the dressing table!” Chatterton ordered. Kohler and others dragged Chrissy to the table and began cutting off his gear. Barb Lander, a nurse by profession, force-fed Chrissy aspirin and water and put an oxygen mask over his face.

“I fucked up, I fucked up, I fucked up!” Chrissy yelled. “I can’t move my legs!”

Lander cradled his head.

“You’re okay, Chrissy,” she said. “You’re on the
Seeker
now.”

Chrissy thrashed and screamed and tried to tear the oxygen mask from his face.

“I can’t breathe!” he screamed. “I’m burning! A monster pinned me! I was trapped!”

At the ladder, Chatterton turned his attention to Chris.

“Chris! Chris! Come on, you’re next. You can do it! Let’s go!” Chatterton yelled.

Chris looked into Chatterton’s eyes.

“I’m not going to make it,” he said. “Tell Sue I’m sorry.”

Chris’s chin dropped to his chest and his head flopped into the water. Chatterton and Kohler, both dressed in street clothes, leaped into the freezing ocean. Chatterton lunged for Chris’s head and lifted it into the air.

“Get me a knife!” Chatterton yelled. The
Seeker
bashed up and down in the Atlantic, hurling Chatterton and Kohler underwater. When the boat rose, Chatterton yelled, “I gotta cut his rig off!”

Kohler pointed to a knife sheathed on Chris’s shoulder. Chatterton grabbed it and slashed at the diver’s harness until Chris’s rig fell away. Chatterton then muscled Chris into a fireman’s carry and brought him up the ladder, straining to hang on as the
Seeker
heaved and exploded into the ocean and sent salt water spraying into the men’s eyes. Kohler looked inside Chris’s mask, praying to see more dread because dread would mean that Chris was still alive. Chris only stared straight ahead. The men dragged him onto the
Seeker’
s deck, his fins sloshing along the sea-soaked wood. Chatterton began CPR on the elder Rouse.

For a few moments, Chris did not respond to Chatterton’s efforts. His skin began to turn blue. Kohler murmured, “Come on, Chris, don’t let go . . . don’t let go . . . don’t let go . . .” Chatterton kept relentlessly at his CPR. Suddenly, Chris threw up into Chatterton’s mouth, and Chatterton could taste the Pepsi he and Chris had shared that morning. Kohler sprang to his feet, hopeful that the vomiting indicated revival. Chatterton looked up at Kohler with eyes from 1970 Vietnam.

“Richie, go in the wheelhouse,” Chatterton said with a calm that seemed to Kohler to mute the raging ocean. “Get pencil and paper. Write down times and events. Be sure to get everything Barb’s doing on that table and everything Chrissy is saying. Make sure she gets vital signs on him. Record everything. We’ll need to send this information with the Coast Guard.”

Chatterton continued the CPR, but with each compression he felt increasing resistance, evidence that Chris’s blood was turning to foam and clotting in his body. After five minutes, Chris’s heart stopped and his skin turned from blue to coal gray. The whites of his eyes were bloody. Chatterton knew he was dead. He kept pumping anyway. You did not give up on a human being just because he was dead.

At the dressing table, Lander pushed Chrissy’s long brown hair out of his face and held his head in her lap as he writhed and screamed and drifted in and out of lucidity.

“The monster got me!” he screamed. “A monster pinned me. Monkeyfuck! It was a monkeyfuck!”

Kohler bit his bottom lip and took notes.

“My father! How is my father?” Chrissy asked.

Kohler and Lander looked toward Chatterton as he pumped away on Chris’s lifeless body. They knew Chris had died.

“John’s with your father,” Kohler told him. “He’s on oxygen. He’s gonna be fine. Hang in, Chrissy. Can you tell me what happened?”

Chrissy went calm and for a moment spoke with a crystalline mind. He told Kohler that something had fallen and pinned him inside the wreck, that his father had come in and freed him, and that while they were ascending he had run out of air. Then, just as quickly, Chrissy spiraled back into delirium.