Shadow Divers (33 page)

“Someone blew up my garage,” Chatterton said aloud. “Someone came in here with a bomb.”

Dazed, he searched for a broom and began sweeping. Virtually nothing on the garage shelves had survived. He kept sweeping. In the rubble, he spotted a metallic silver shape. He picked it up. This was the escape lung’s oxygen bottle, but it was no longer cylindrical and closed. Now it was flattened, like a toothpaste tube sliced open.

“Goddamn,” Chatterton said. “The oxygen bottle exploded. The thing was still live. The escape lung blew up my garage.”

Chatterton looked closer at the flattened cylinder. The explosion had blasted away a half century’s encrustation, the part that could not be removed with simple wiping. Chatterton pulled it close to his face. Stamped onto the flattened metal was a bit of writing. It said:
15.4.44.

Chatterton knew right away what the numbers meant. He ran into his home and called Kohler.

“Richie, man, the oxygen bottle blew up my garage,” he said.

“What?”

“The escape lung. Remember the oxygen bottle? It was still charged. I let it dry in my garage. The corrosion must have caused it to blow. All my
Doria
stuff in the garage is destroyed. My garage is like a war zone. But listen to this: the explosion produced a clue. The bottle has a date on it
—fifteen-dot-four-dot-forty-four—
that’s European for April 15, 1944. That’s the hydrostatic test date, the date the bottle was examined and certified to be good.”

“That means our U-boat sailed after April 15, 1944,” Kohler said.

“Exactly.”

“I’ll be right there.”

Chatterton returned to the garage. He picked up the broom but could not sweep. Only now did it occur to him how lucky he had been while handling the escape lung. He had carried the artifact in his goody bag for his hour-long decompression, eyeballed it on board the
Seeker,
stored it next to his pickup truck’s gas tank, moved it around on his garage shelves. As he awaited Kohler’s arrival, two thoughts tolled inside his mind. First, it seemed more certain than ever that the wreck was
U-857,
which had departed for war in February 1945. And second, perhaps the divers were getting too close—that, crazy as it sounded, maybe the dead crewmen were beginning to fight back.

A few hours after finding his garage blown up, Chatterton called Major Gregory Weidenfeld, the Civil Air Patrol historian who had dedicated himself to proving that two everyday civilians in a private plane had sunk a U-boat off New Jersey in 1942.

“Listen, Greg,” Chatterton said. “We found a hydrostatic test date that proves the wreck sailed sometime after April 15, 1944. That excludes the chance that this is your U-boat. I’m really sorry.”

For a moment, Chatterton believed he could hear Weidenfeld struggling to compose himself. He could not remember a time when he had met someone so loyal to the memories of the slighted.

“Thank you, John,” Weidenfeld said. “That means there’s another U-boat out there you’ll have to find.”

A few days later, Chatterton received word that his friend the U-boat ace Karl-Friedrich Merten had died at age eighty-seven. The news was not unexpected, as Merten had been ill for some time. But Chatterton knew that Merten’s passing, together with his own good-bye to Weidenfeld, meant that a chapter in the divers’ quest had closed. For a year, Chatterton, Kohler, and Yurga had considered
U-158
(via the Civil Air Patrol) and
U-851
(via Merten’s information about his colleague Weingärtner) as the likeliest solutions to the mystery. They had cut their research teeth on these theories, and had considered the men friends.

Weather and scheduling prevented the
Seeker
from returning to the
U-Who
until July 31, two months after the season’s first trip. The divers practically had to sit on their hands to contain themselves when the boat finally departed for the wreck. This would be the trip when Packer and Gatto would begin to make their haul from the diesel motor room.

The next morning, Chatterton and Kohler splashed and headed toward the sub’s forward compartments, areas they still thought likely to yield identifying artifacts. As before, Chatterton studied the debris field, quieting his mind to acclimate his eyes to the shapes of order. In the commander’s quarters, lying in plain view, he spotted a pair of binoculars.

“I’ve been here a dozen times and there were no binoculars in here,” Chatterton thought. “There’s no way I would have missed that.”

Chatterton lifted the binoculars to his mask. Some optics were missing, and much was encrusted in sea growth. He placed the piece in his bag. If the pair had belonged to the commander, perhaps his name lay inscribed underneath the muck. The remainder of Chatterton’s search produced little. All the while he thought about how poetic it was to have recovered binoculars in a dive dedicated to seeing.

Kohler continued to dig in the noncommissioned officers’ quarters. He had been meticulous in avoiding the closet in which the crewmen’s shoes lay neatly arranged, as well as other areas near the compartment’s abundant human remains. In a silt pile he spotted what appeared to be a bowl and brought it to his mask for inspection. It took just a moment for Kohler to realize he was holding a skull. Silt poured from the eye sockets and nasal cavity. A year ago he might have panicked and flung the skull back into the debris. Today, he held it and looked into its eyes.

“I’m going to do my best to figure out your name,” Kohler said aloud. “Your families should know where you are.”

It was time to leave the wreck. He took the skull and gently placed it in such a way as to allow it to look out over the compartment and its mates.

Topside, Chatterton and Kohler washed the binoculars. The apparatus was unmarked. Now they could do no more than await the arrival of Packer and Gatto, who had gone to work inside the promising diesel motor room. An hour later that team climbed the ladder. Packer’s goody bag bulged. He opened the mesh container and removed a pressure gauge the size of a dinner plate—one of the instruments Chatterton and Kohler had seen in books stamped with a U-boat’s identity. The divers pressed in for a closer look. Etched on the gauge’s aluminum face was the eagle and swastika. The rest of the face, however, contained only generic words and numerals. Packer wiped the gauge’s body. It nearly crumbled in his hands. As with the torpedo room tags, this instrument had been constructed with the cheap metal porridge used by Germany during its late-war raw-materials shortage. The implication was grave: other artifacts inside the diesel motor room—including identifying tags—were probably made of the same low-grade materials and had likely not survived the ocean environment.

Ripping currents made short work of most second dives. That night, as the
Seeker
cut through the blue-black Atlantic on her way back to Brielle, few of the divers found themselves with much to say. In the wheelhouse, while Nagle muttered, “This goddamned U-boat . . .,” Chatterton made a short entry in his logbook. It read, “Where to next?”

The
Seeker
made four trips to the U-boat over the next six weeks. Packer and Gatto continued their work inside the open portion of the diesel motor room. They gathered beautiful and interesting artifacts: a gauge panel, plastic tags, even a telegraph, the instrument used to signal orders like
ALL STOP, FULL AHEAD,
and
DIVE.
All the marks were generic; none identified the wreck. Further access into the compartment was blocked by a massive steel pipe that lay angled in the narrow walkway between the two diesel engines. Kohler recognized this pipe as an escape trunk, a vertical tunnel with an interior ladder through which crewmen could flee a sinking U-boat. Now wedged between the engines and reaching from floor to ceiling, the escape trunk blocked any further penetration into the diesel motor room and the adjoining electric motor room. The loss did not seem severe—if the smorgasbord of items Packer and Gatto had thus far recovered revealed nothing about the U-boat’s identity, it was unlikely that the remainder of these technical rooms held the answer.

Chatterton and Kohler devoted their dives to the U-boat’s forward section. They recovered various artifacts—bowls, cups, shoes, gauges—not a bit of which contained identification. Chatterton pulled two gems from the wreck, museum-quality pieces that drew gasps from his fellow divers. One of them, lying fully exposed in an area Chatterton had combed a dozen times before, was a surgeon’s kit, a collection of stainless steel medical instruments complete with instructional diagrams—printed in still-brilliant red and black inks—on linen canvases. None of it, however, revealed the wreck’s identity.

“You guys can have all these instruments,” Chatterton told the other divers. “I’ll keep the diagrams for my house.”

“Christ, John, that surgeon’s kit is a gorgeous find, one of a kind,” someone said. “You can’t give it away.”

“I’m looking to identify the wreck,” Chatterton replied. “The kit doesn’t do it. It’s yours.”

On the next trip, Chatterton recovered the chronometer—the U-boat’s precision clock—from the commander’s quarters. It was another major score. As with the surgeon’s kit, he had found the chronometer lying in the open in an area of the commander’s quarters he had searched repeatedly. Topside, he inspected the handsome instrument for evidence of the wreck’s identity. Except for the markings of the eagle and swastika, there was none. Chatterton moved to throw overboard the chronometer’s wooden box.

“What the hell are you doing?” Kohler asked, rushing forward.

“The box tells us nothing,” Chatterton said.

“It’s a spectacular find! Are you crazy? That’s a career find!”

“That’s not what’s important.”

“Give me the clock and the box,” Kohler said. “I got a restoration guy. Give it to me and I’ll make it beautiful for your house.”

“Whatever you want, Richie.”

“Christ, John, what’s going on with you?”

Riding back to Brielle that night, Chatterton told Kohler what was going on with him. He had begun the dive season with a ferocious optimism, certain that his brand of hard work, preparation, and instinct—his artistry—would pay off in a positive identification of the wreck. Now, four months and six trips later, he found himself with all kinds of crazy thoughts. He worried for the first time that a greenhorn diver would climb the
Seeker
’s ladder with an identification tag stuck to his fin, becoming the accidental but official discoverer of the
U-Who
’s name.

“It’s not that I care about who gets the credit,” he told Kohler. “It’s that it would mean my approach hadn’t worked.”

He worried about how he and Kohler had missed major artifacts in earlier explorations only to find them lying in the open on later dives.

“It’s like the crewmen are putting stuff out for me,” Chatterton said. “But it’s not the stuff I want. It’s like they’re saying, ‘Hey, let’s put out the binoculars for him; that’ll really get him going.’”

Kohler put down his beer.

“Listen, John, we can do it,” Kohler said. “If I have to row us out here in a canoe I’ll do it. I’m with you. I believe in what we’re doing. Let’s keep pounding. You tell me what you need and I’m there. We ain’t quitting.”

It was then that Chatterton fully understood what Kohler had meant to the project. He was a first-rate diver, one of the best, and a passionate and creative researcher. But deeper than that he was a believer, and as Chatterton watched Kohler reach for a handshake, he knew that this was the most important thing of all, that in a quest in which men were asked to really know themselves, an unflinching belief in the possible survived all. Chatterton shook Kohler’s hand.

“We ain’t quitting,” he said.

Even as October’s autumn settled over New Jersey, Chatterton and Kohler believed they might squeeze in another trip or two to the
U-Who.
Nagle, however, was of a different mind. Little more than a skeleton, he was no longer capable of captaining the
Seeker.

His business had begun to fail. When prospective customers inquired about charters, Nagle would say, “Oh, that’s a nice request, but how about this: Fuck you! I’m dying! I don’t care about you or your sunny smiles or your bullshit artificial-reef wrecks! I never cared anything about you! Don’t you get it? I’m gonna die! Good-bye!” As the season wore on, Chatterton found it painful to look at his old friend and mentor.

In October, Nagle was rushed by his girlfriend to the hospital, bleeding from the throat. Years of alcohol abuse had caused him to develop esophageal varices, varicose veins in his throat, which had then ruptured. Doctors hurried him to surgery and cauterized the damage. In the recovery room they told him, “You came within fifteen minutes of bleeding to death. If you continue to consume alcohol, even a single drink, we might not be able to save you next time.”

Nagle’s girlfriend broke up with him while he was still in the hospital. She could not bear to watch him kill himself. A few weeks later, Nagle checked himself out of the hospital. On the way home he stopped at the liquor store. That night, after consuming nearly a full bottle of vodka, he bled to death from the throat. Bill Nagle, one of the greatest shipwreck divers of all time, the man who had taken the bell off the
Andrea Doria,
was dead at forty-one.

Divers from across the Northeast made plans to attend Nagle’s funeral in Pennsylvania. Chatterton, one of his dearest friends, did not. Kohler could not accept that decision.

“What do you mean you’re not going to the funeral?” Kohler asked.

“The guy in that box is not Bill Nagle,” Chatterton said. “The guy in that box killed my friend.”

“You should go,” Kohler said. “You need to say good-bye to your friend.”

Chatterton could not bring himself to attend. At the funeral, Kohler and the other pallbearers lifted Nagle’s coffin. As he walked Nagle to the grave, Kohler could not get over the lightness of the box. “It’s like there’s nothing inside,” he thought to himself, and it was then that he wished most of all that Chatterton was beside him.