Shadow Divers (7 page)

Then, Yurga. He had stopped, by chance, at a naval bookstore the day before to pick up some light reading for the trip. His choice:
The U-boat: The Evolution and Technical History of German Submarines.
When he produced the book after surfacing, the divers crowded over his shoulder to compare their memories to the book’s detailed schematic diagrams. Chatterton recognized the cylindrical bottles he had seen on the wreck. Yurga saw the flooding vents. This thing had to be German. This thing had to be a U-boat.

As the divers continued their discussion and book study, Chatterton and Nagle drifted from the group and climbed into the wheelhouse. The crew pulled the anchor. Nagle set a course back for Brielle, fired the diesels, and pulled away from the site. Then he and Chatterton began a private discussion.

This was a historic dive, they agreed, but discovery was only half the job. The other half, the everything half, lay in identification. Both men scoffed at divers who guessed at the identity of wrecks they had found, who didn’t understand the slovenliness of saying, “Well, we found a piece of china with a Danish stamp, therefore the wreck is Danish.” Were Nagle and Chatterton simply to announce that they had found a submarine, what would that really tell anyone? But to announce with certainty the identity of the submarine you discovered, to give the nameless a name—that is when a man writes history.

To Nagle, there were also more worldly reasons for making the identification. Even in his broken-down physical state, the captain retained his appetite for glory. Identifying this submarine would guarantee his legacy as a dive legend and extend his reputation to the outside world, a place that didn’t know from the USS
San Diego
or even the
Andrea Doria
but always paid attention to the word
U-boat.
A find like this would make him famous. A positive identification would mean customers. In those rare instances when a dive charter captain discovered a shipwreck, he came to own that wreck in the minds of divers; they wanted to travel with the guy who’d found the missing, to attach themselves to history through the man who had looked inside it.

Nagle and Chatterton believed it would take just another dive or two to pull a positive piece of identification from the wreck: a tag, a builder’s plaque, a diary, something. Until then, there was sound reason not to utter a word of the discovery to anyone. A virgin sub—especially if it were a U-boat—would attract the attention of rival divers everywhere. Some might attempt to shadow the
Seeker
on its next trip in order to pick off the location. Others might guess at the general vicinity of the location, then try to sneak up on the
Seeker
while she was anchored with divers in the water, unable to cut away and run. Once a rival had the numbers, he could rush in and steal the
Seeker
’s credit and glory; there would be no shortage of pirates looking to make their bones on such a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. But in the minds of Chatterton and Nagle, the gravest threat came from a single source, and neither man had to invoke the name to know against whom they had to guard this wreck with their lives.

Bielenda.

In 1991, the eastern seaboard featured only a handful of big-name dive charter boats. The
Seeker
was one of them. Another was the Long Island–based
Wahoo,
a fifty-five-foot fiberglass hull captained by fifty-five-year-old Steve Bielenda, a barrel-chested, cherubic-faced man who looked to be accordioned under his two-hundred-fifteen-pound frame. A 1980
Newsday
feature had dubbed Bielenda “King of the Deep,” and he seemed unwilling to allow a day to pass without reminding those who would listen—and especially those who would not—of the coronation.

From the moment Nagle entered the charter business, in the mid-1980s, he and Bielenda despised each other. No one, including the captains themselves, seemed certain how the hard feelings started, but for years they lobbed accusations at each other, verbal grenades filled with reputation-piercing shrapnel: Nagle was a drunk has-been who endangered his divers and berated customers; Bielenda was a do-nothing blowhard who was just following the money, going with the established wrecks, doing nothing new. Customers often found themselves forced to choose sides; a diver became either Stevie’s boy or Billy’s boy, and pity the soul who confessed to diving with both. “You’re diving the
Wahoo
next week?” an incredulous Nagle would ask customers. “What kind of fucking guy are you? He’ll break your balls and steal your money. You’re cattle to him.” It was equally unpretty on the
Wahoo,
where the crew would join Bielenda in a dressing-down of anyone foolish enough to admit enjoying the
Seeker.
“Hose this guy off,”
Wahoo
crewmen were heard to say loudly of paying customers. “He stinks like the
Seeker.
” After one
Wahoo
customer admitted to a fondness for Nagle, he found the hardcover book he had brought along at the bottom of the boat’s bilge. By 1991, the Bielenda-Nagle feud had become notorious.

To Nagle’s supporters, the foundation of Bielenda’s bitterness was basic: Nagle was a threat to Bielenda’s title. Nagle drank too much, sure, but he remained an explorer, an original thinker, a researcher, a dreamer, a man of daring. And he was, as his growing customer base noted, a bit of a diving legend. To many, Bielenda seemed to do little of what made Nagle great, little of the pioneering that should have been protein to a true king of the deep. Next to Nagle, Bielenda appeared to play it safe, a guy who would always sit out bad weather at the dock while Nagle challenged angry seas. As Nagle’s reputation for exploration grew, customers drifted to his boat. Bielenda’s business could easily withstand the migration; what he seemed unable to tolerate was the affront to his throne.

It wasn’t Bielenda’s words, however, that worried Nagle as the
Seeker
bobbed above this mystery submarine. It was his certainty that Bielenda would stop at nothing to claim-jump the wreck. He had heard stories about Bielenda—that if you crewed for him on the
Wahoo,
you might be expected to give him a choice of whatever artifacts you recovered; that he half-jokingly told customers that should they ever recover the
Oregon
’s bell while diving from the
Wahoo,
they had better be prepared to gift it to the King of the Deep or swim the thirteen miles back to shore with the artifact; that Bielenda had friends, and they seemed to be everywhere—in the Coast Guard, on other charters, on fishing boats, in the Eastern Dive Boat Association, of which he was president. Nagle was convinced that if word leaked of the U-boat discovery, Bielenda would head straight for it and his goals would be threefold and deadly: identify the wreck; raid the artifacts; take the credit.

Chatterton figured that even if the
Wahoo
didn’t jump the wreck, other divers looking to make their bones would try. Secrecy, therefore, would have to be paramount.

“The
Seeker
is booked for the next two weeks,” Nagle told Chatterton. “Let’s come back on the twenty-first, a Saturday. We invite only the guys on this trip, no one else, not a goddamn other person, because these guys took a shot and that’ll be their reward. We make a pact. Nobody on the boat breathes a word to anyone. This is our submarine.”

“I’m with you,” Chatterton said.

Chatterton left Nagle to steer in the wheelhouse and walked down the steep white stairs to the rear deck. He called the divers together and asked them to step into the salon for a meeting. One by one, the divers gathered on bunks, on the floor, by the toaster, under the
Playboy
centerfolds, their hair still slicked with salt water, a few clutching pretzels or Cokes. Chatterton addressed the group in his booming, Long Island–tinged baritone.

“This is a huge dive,” he said. “But finding it isn’t enough. We need to identify it. We identify it and we rewrite history.

“Bill and I have made a decision. We’re coming back to the wreck on September twenty-first. It’s a private trip—only you guys are invited. No one else comes. There are a lot of great divers out there, guys who are legends, who would kill to come with us. They aren’t coming. If you decide not to attend, your bunk stays empty.

“But we gotta keep this thing secret. Word gets out that we found a submarine and we’ll have two hundred guys crawling all over our asses out here.”

Chatterton paused for a moment. No one made a sound. He asked the men to swear an oath of secrecy. Every diver on the boat, he said, had to swear silence about what they had found this day. If others asked what the men had done today, they were to say they dove the
Parker.
He told them to eliminate the word
submarine
from their vocabularies. He told them to say nothing to anyone until they identified the wreck.

“This must be unanimous,” Chatterton said. “Every one of you guys needs to agree. If even a single guy in this room isn’t comfortable keeping this secret, that’s cool, that’s fine, but then the next trip becomes catch-as-catch-can, an open boat, anyone welcome. So I gotta ask you now: Is everyone in?”

Deep-wreck charters are not communal events. The divers’ presence together on the boat is a matter of transportation, not teamwork; each devises his own plan, seeks his own artifacts, makes his own discoveries. Deep-wreck divers, however friendly, learn to think of themselves as self-contained entities. In dangerous waters, such a mind-set enables them to survive. Now Chatterton was proposing that fourteen men become a single, silent organism. Agreements like this simply did not occur on dive charters.

For a moment there was silence. Some of these men had only just met on this trip.

Then, one by one, the divers went around the room and spoke.

“I’m in.”

“Me, too.”

“I’m not saying shit.”

“Count me in.”

“My mouth is shut.”

In a minute it was done. Every man had agreed. This was their submarine. This was their submarine alone.

The
Seeker
glided back toward Brielle on a cushion of hope and possibility. Divers passed around Yurga’s U-boat book and tried to contain themselves, fashioning responsible rejoinders like “We know this will take time to research and will likely be complex, but with solid work we should be optimistic about identification.” Inside, they were jumping on trampolines and dancing in sandboxes. As evening fell, they allowed themselves to invent scenarios to explain their submarine, and in the heady triumph of the journey home, all theories were credible, every idea a possibility:
Could Hitler be aboard this sub? Isn’t there some rumor he tried to escape Germany at the end of the war? Maybe the wreck is filled with Nazi gold.
Six hours later, at about nine
P.M.,
Nagle eased the boat back into its slip and the divers gathered their gear.

One diver, Steve Feldman, stayed back, waiting for Chatterton to emerge from the wheelhouse. Of the fourteen men aboard this boat, Feldman was the newest to the sport, with about ten years of experience. He had discovered diving later in life, at thirty-four, after a painful divorce. So hopelessly had he fallen in love with scuba that he had virtually willed himself to become an instructor, and of late had been teaching diving classes in Manhattan. Many of the divers on board, including Chatterton, had never seen Feldman before this trip; he dove most often in warm-water resort locations or for lobsters on Captain Paul Hepler’s famous Wednesday bug runs off Long Island. As Chatterton made his way down to the back deck, Feldman stopped him.

“John, I want to thank you,” he said. “This trip has been so cool. And it’s important, it’s really important. I can’t wait until we go back. I mean, I’m really excited to be returning, and I just want to thank you and Bill for including me on something like this. This is like a dream come true.”

“It is for me, too, pal,” Chatterton said. “This is the thing you dream about.”

The
Seeker
’s secret lasted nearly two full hours. Around midnight, Kevin Brennan dialed his close friend Richie Kohler, a fellow Brooklynite.

At twenty-nine, Kohler was already one of the eastern seaboard’s most accomplished and daring deep-wreck divers. He was also a passionate amateur historian with a keen interest in all things German. To Brennan, it would have been disloyal to keep such exciting news from his friend. Kohler, in fact, would have been invited on the
Seeker
trip but for a history of bad blood with Chatterton. Kohler had been one of “Stevie’s boys,” and though he had since had an angry falling-out with Bielenda, his history with Chatterton and Bielenda virtually guaranteed that he would not have been welcome on this trip.

The phone rang in Kohler’s bedroom.

“Richie, man, Richie, wake up. It’s Kevin.”

“What time is it . . .?”

“Listen, man, wake up. We found something really good.”

“What’d you find? What time is it?”

“That’s the thing, Richie—I can’t tell you what we found.”

Kohler’s wife rolled over and glared. He took the phone into the kitchen.

“Kevin, cut the shit. Just tell me what you found.”

“No, man. I took an oath. I promised not to tell. You can’t make me tell.”

“Look, Kevin. You can’t call here at midnight, tell me you found something great, then expect me to go back to sleep. Let’s have it.”

“I can’t, man. Richie, come on, don’t bust my balls. I’ll tell you what: take a guess. If you guess right, I won’t say no.”

So Kohler, in his underwear and still bleary-eyed, plopped down at the kitchen table and guessed. Is it a passenger liner? No. A barge? No. The
Cayru
? The
Carolina
? The
Texel
? Nope, nope, nope. The guessing ballet continued for another five minutes; always Brennan’s answer was no. Kohler rose and paced the room. His face turned red.

“Kevin, give me a hint, you bastard! You’re breaking my shoes here.”

Brennan thought it over. Then, in a thick, almost cartoonish Italian accent, he said, “It’s-a-not-a-MY boat, it’s-a . . .”