Shadow Divers (6 page)

By now, Chatterton had reached the end of his twenty-minute bottom time. He swam back to the strobe light he had clipped to the anchor line, staying close to the wreck to shield himself from the wrath of the onrushing current. As he swam, he watched the hull’s rolled edges unfold below him, beautiful curves engineered for stealth, curves that still looked secret.

It was time for Chatterton to leave. His first scheduled decompression stop was not until a depth of 60 feet. On the way up, his narcosis fading, he argued against himself. “Maybe you didn’t see a torpedo. Maybe you saw a fan inside a pipe barge. People come up from 230 feet saying stupid things all the time, and now you’re going to be the guy saying the stupid stuff.” He knew better. He had controlled his narcosis. That was a torpedo. That was the bow of a U-boat.

Chatterton made his first stop at 60 feet. The water was sunlit and warm. The last traces of narcosis had evaporated. The torpedo’s image now throbbed sharp in his memory. The catalog of submarines he had studied over the years emerged as a dossier before him. Some were hundreds of miles to the north, others hundreds of miles south. None was anywhere near here. Could there be a crew on board? Could this be a U-boat with a crew on board that no one in the world knew about but him? Too fantastic. And what was it doing in New Jersey waters?

Chatterton ascended to 40 feet and began his second hang. There, he remembered a dream he’d had years ago of finding a mystery submarine. In that dream, the sub he discovered was Russian and the crew still on board. It was a glorious dream, but the part he remembered most was how immediately he realized it had been a dream, and he had realized this within a second of awakening because such a wonderful thing could never happen in real life.

Chatterton ascended to 30 feet and began another stop. He had another twenty-five minutes decompression time before he could surface and brief the others about his find. Topside, the divers followed Chatterton’s bubbles as they gurgled to the surface along the anchor line. They were supposed to wait for him to surface.

“The suspense is killing me,” Brennan told the other divers. “I gotta do something.”

Brennan, with his long hair, Fu Manchu mustache, and “It’s cool, dude” sensibility, might have passed for a Grateful Dead roadie if he hadn’t been such a meticulous diver. While every other man aboard the
Seeker
that day favored a modern dry suit that provided deep insulation from the forty-degree Atlantic bottom temperatures, Brennan stayed loyal to the tattered, epoxied, and patched wet suit he wore to retrieve sunken golf carts and fix swimming pools in rich folks’ backyards. Bound by duty, other divers would break Brennan’s stones about his ancient getup. “Kevin,” they’d ask, “does that suit date to the Neolithic or Mesozoic era?”

“You guys want to be all toasty and warm,” Brennan would counter. “I wear this same suit to the
Doria,
man. The
Doria
! I have more mobility in this thing than all you guys put together. And goddamn it, if I gotta piss, I piss. You mooks in your dry suits have to hold it in. Fuck that crap—I piss!”

Other divers would hear this explanation and shake their heads. It was forty degrees on the
Doria.
A wet suit was like wearing a T-shirt. But damn if Brennan didn’t surface after ninety minutes in those temperatures clutching some killer artifact or fat lobster. Grinning ear to ear as he stepped out of his patchwork wet suit, dive after successful dive, he seemed to have a bit of Houdini in him.

As Chatterton’s bubbles continued to rise along the anchor line, Brennan geared up in his trademark minimalist fashion. He didn’t believe in draping himself in backup gear and the latest accoutrements—those guys looked like goddamn Christmas trees. To Brennan, the less you carried, the less that could go wrong. And the faster you could splash in case you couldn’t stand the suspense any longer.

Within minutes, Brennan had flipped over the
Seeker
’s side. Seconds later he reached Chatterton, who was still hanging, still shoehorning the wonder of his discovery into the reality centers of his brain. Brennan startled him with a tap on the shoulder, then put his palms up and shrugged his shoulders, the universal “What’s up?” signal. Chatterton removed a writing slate and pencil from his goody bag, then scrawled a single word as big and bold as would fit on the tablet. It said, “SUB.”

For a moment, Brennan could not move. Then he began to scream through his regulator. The words came out as if spoken from behind two pillows, but were still intelligible.

“Are you kidding, John? Are you sure? Really?”

Chatterton nodded.

Brennan yelled, “Oh, God! Oh, shit! Oh, Christ!”

Brennan could have plunged straight down to the wreck and had the submarine to himself. But this was not the kind of information decent dudes hoarded. He shot back up the anchor line, bobbed on the surface, and yanked the regulator from his mouth.

“Yo, Bill! Bill!” he called to Nagle, who was still in the wheelhouse. Nagle rushed outside the compartment, thinking Brennan was in trouble—a diver wouldn’t surface and scream after a minute underwater unless he was in trouble.

“What the hell happened, Kevin?” Nagle called.

“Yo! Bill! Bill! Check this out: John says it’s a submarine!”

Nagle did not need to hear anything else. He ran down the wheelhouse stairs and gathered the remaining divers.

“Chatterton says it’s a sub.”

Until this point, many of the divers had held deep reservations about exploring a new wreck at 230 feet. The word
sub
vaporized those concerns. The divers rushed to gear up. Only Nagle, whose alcoholism had degraded his physical condition and had made this kind of deep diving impossible, remained behind. On the anchor line, Brennan stuffed the regulator back into his mouth and headed down, pumping a pair of “Way to go!” fists as he passed Chatterton. Several minutes later, as Chatterton ascended to his 20-foot stop, the other eleven divers dropped past him on an express parade to the virgin wreck. Chatterton hadn’t had his chance to brief the men on the wreck’s danger or depth, but he would have had to lie about the submarine to prevent any of them from diving that day, and Chatterton didn’t lie. The wreck lay at 230 feet at its bottommost point in the sand, about 210 feet at the top—the outer range of doable for a dozen men dizzy with possibility.

When Chatterton finally finished decompressing, he swam underneath the
Seeker
and climbed the aluminum ladder at its stern. Nagle waited for his protégé, hanging on the back rail until Chatterton could remove his mask and sit on the dressing table. Jim Beam had chipped away at Nagle’s muscles and reflexes and had begun to turn his skin yellow, but it hadn’t touched his explorer’s heart, the part of him that believed an alcoholic world still to be beautiful for the stories it hid in secret places. He ambled over to Chatterton, shaded his eyes from the sun, and nodded to his friend. He wanted to say something momentous because this was the day men like he and Chatterton dreamed of. Instead the two men simply looked at each other.

“I hear we did good,” Nagle finally said.

“Yeah, Bill,” Chatterton said, clapping his friend on the shoulder. “We did good.”

For a minute, Nagle could only shake his head and say, “Damn!” Every fiber in his failing body leaned toward the ocean in the way plants bend toward the sun. He had never so desperately desired to splash as he did at this moment. He had long since stopped bringing gear. But as he gazed at Chatterton, his mind was already in the water.

“Tell me about it, John,” Nagle said. “Tell me everything. Tell me every detail, every bit of what you saw and felt and heard.”

Until this point, Chatterton had never been able to tell Nagle anything new. Whatever groundbreaking work Chatterton had done on the
Doria
and other great wrecks, Nagle had been there first, and this had pushed Chatterton to explore harder and deeper, to go someday where even the great Bill Nagle hadn’t gone. That day, Chatterton could see in Nagle’s grade-school-big eyes, had come. He told Nagle everything.

As he finished his narrative, Chatterton expected Nagle to ask technical questions, to grill him on the wreck’s level of metallic degradation or the silt buildup inside the torpedo hatch. Instead Nagle said, “This submarine can change me. This can motivate me and get my health back. This is the thing that can get me back.”

As Nagle helped Chatterton undress, the other divers began their exploration of the wreck 230 feet below. The current had eased since Chatterton had departed, allowing those so inclined to swim along the hull without fear of exhaustion.

Ostrowski and Roberts studied the outline of the wreck and the flatness of its topside decking. Both pegged it for a submarine. The duo swam slowly along the top of the wreck, careful not to overbreathe in their excitement, never knowing whether they moved forward or aft. They soon reached a hole in the top of the steel hull that looked to have been blown violently inward; steel didn’t bend like that willingly. They stuck their heads inside, and their lights brought to life a zoo of broken pipes, machinery, valves, and switches. They craned their necks upward and lit nests of electric cables dangling from the ceiling. Their breath quickened. This room could contain history; a quick swim in and a quick swim out and they might find the wreck’s identity. Neither dared enter. This room might contain answers, but it also held a hundred ways to kill the overeager diver.

Shoe and Cochran took in the wreck’s cigar shape and considered its level of deterioration. Each had experience diving World War II ships, and this wreck looked to them to be worn in just the same ways. The team spent most of its dive working to loosen a valve that interested Cochran, but the part would not budge.

Hildemann, diving alone, had a tougher time believing that the mass he stood on was a submarine. That changed as he arrived near the bow of the wreck about 10 feet off the sand, where he saw a long, narrow tube reaching into the boat. He had read books on submarines before. This was a torpedo tube—the weapon’s passageway into the ocean.

Skibinski and Feldman ventured forty feet from the wreck to obtain a wider view, a bold decision at this depth and visibility. They looked at each other and nodded: a submarine. They swam back toward the strobe they had clipped to the anchor line. Both men had dived the
Texas Tower,
one of the darkest of the Northeast’s deep wrecks. This wreck was darker. They stayed close to the strobe.

McMahon and Yurga remained atop the wreck. They, too, knew that this streamlined form belonged to a submarine. As they drifted higher, Yurga spotted flooding vents along the hull, the centerpiece of a submarine’s diving system. A minute later, Yurga beheld the angled hatch that Chatterton had seen. He, too, pushed his head and light inside. He, too, saw the tail fins and propeller of the most notorious sea weapon ever built. The men yearned to see more, but each had agreed topside that at this depth, their first priority would be to stay near the anchor line and therefore stay alive. Yurga grabbed a lobster and joined McMahon on the ascent back to the dive boat.

Brennan, the first to arrive after Chatterton, inched forward in the current until he came to what he recognized was the bow of the sub. He allowed himself to drift farther forward until he was twenty feet in front of the wreck, then turned around to face the bow. He bled a wisp of air from his wings and sank gently to the sand, landing on his knees. He knelt there as a worshiper, reverent before this grand, unmistakable mass. The current began to howl, but Brennan stayed rooted in the sand, transfixed.

“I can’t believe this,” he thought. “I know this is a U-boat. I know this thing is German. Look at it! It’s coming right at me, like in the opening scene in
Das Boot.
I can hear the music from the movie.”

From behind his wonder and narcosis, an inner voice managed to remind Brennan about the current. He swam back, fighting the water every kick of the way until he reached the anchor line, deeply narced, winded, and light-headed. “I’ll never let go of that wreck again,” he promised himself. Then he began his ascent back to the
Seeker.

Between 1939 and 1945, Germany assembled a force of 1,167 U-boats. Each one, for its ability to stalk enemies invisibly, became the most perfect and terrible reflection of man’s first fear—that death lurks silently and everywhere, always. Some U-boats crept with impunity to within a few miles of American shores, close enough to tune in jazz radio stations and watch automobile headlights through their periscopes. In one month in 1940, U-boats sank 66 ships while losing only one of their own. Bodies of men killed aboard ships sunk by U-boats washed up on American shores during World War II. The sight was gruesome. The implication—that the killers could be anywhere but could not be seen or heard—was magnitudes worse.

Of those 1,167 U-boats, 757 were either sunk, captured, bombed in home ports or foreign bases, or fell from accident or collision. Of the 859 U-boats that left base for frontline patrol, 648 were sunk or captured while operating at sea, a loss rate of more than 75 percent. Some were sunk by enemy vessels and aircraft that could not confirm the kills, others by mines, still others by mechanical or human failure. Because most U-boats died beneath the water’s surface, as many as 65 disappeared without explanation. In worlds of unsearchable water, U-boats made the perfect unfindable graves.

This day, as the divers began to surface and board the
Seeker,
they rushed out of their gear and into debate. Each of them was giddy to have discovered a virgin submarine. Each of them already had a theory. It could be
U-550,
a U-boat supposedly sunk in the far North Atlantic but never recovered. It could
not
be the American
S-5;
numerous divers had searched for and researched that sub for years and were certain it lay near Maryland. The crew could have escaped—a hatch looked to be open, though it was hard to tell. Something violent might have happened to the submarine—no one had seen the conning tower, the distinctively shaped observation post and entryway atop submarines that houses the periscopes and serves as the commander’s battle station. A refrain began to build: Where the hell was the conning tower?