Titanic's Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler

by Brad Matsen

  Wolfinger had not been able to make a firm deal for a film to underwrite the expedition, but if they found pieces of steel that had been peeled from Titanic’s hull, he knew he’d have plenty of buyers for the story and the pictures.

  Concannon had grown increasingly believable. He had gone through his notes and found the exact coordinates of the tantalizing wreckage he had seen in 2000. He had the location of other debris that could be equally sensational—pieces of the grand staircase, and trunks and suitcases that might have come from a cargo hold. He seemed less like someone going off half-cocked to feed his own ego and more like a genuine explorer hungry for the truth.

  Even without a contract for a movie deal, Wolfinger fronted the cost of high-definition cameras, a cameraman, and a soundman. For the underwater photography, he arranged for the most experienced Titanic cinematographer, Ralph White, and an equally experienced deep-ocean imaging technician, Billy Lange, to join the crew. Wolfinger also hired naval architect Roger Long, with whom he had worked on earlier films about shipwrecks. Long designed and built ships, but more important to the investigation into the ribbons of steel, he had two decades of experience in maritime forensics and ship stability. Simon Mills, an English historian who had been studying the Olympic-class ships for most of his life, signed up. Bob Blumberg, the U.S. State Department’s specialist on shipwrecks and salvage treaties, was coming along as an observer. Joe Porter, the editor of Wreck Diving Magazine, joined the expedition as its photographer and reporter.

  Keldysh sailed at dusk on August 10, 2005. After sunset, when the spectacular granite bluffs of Newfoundland had faded to slivers on the western horizon, Anatoly Sagalevich’s voice crackled over the intercom. Everyone was to assemble in the main conference room for a briefing. Captain Yuri Gorbach ran the ship, but Sagalevich, whom everybody called Tolya, was in charge of the diving.

  For anyone who knew the history of deep-ocean exploration, being in a room with Anatoly Sagalevich was the equivalent of an audience with Neil Armstrong. As a young man, Sagalevich had worked as a professional basketball player and jazz musician, then enrolled in college to become an electrical engineer. For thirty-five years, he had been the head of the P. P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, where he’d helped design the two Mir submersibles. Sagalevich had published more than three hundred scientific papers, written twelve books, and spent more than three thousand hours piloting the Mirs.

  The key members of the expedition team, along with a few others, assembled around Sagalevich. Kohler had brought his wife, Carrie, a qualified wreck diver who was hoping for a seat on one of the Mir dives. Concannon had his new wife, Donna, with him, along with a friend who ran a dive shop in Pennsylvania, Tom Maddux, and Maddux’s son.

  Wolfinger and his crew moved around the conference room, dipping for camera angles and swinging the microphone boom to record conversations. The first gathering of an expedition, whether in a hotel, a tent, or this room on the world’s biggest research ship, was known as the meet and greet. These meetings were all the same. Hellos for old friends, introductions to new ones, and the camaraderie of the optimistic moment at the beginning of an expedition when a great discovery seems like a sure thing.

  Sagalevich opened with a joke. Mir translates to the English word “peace,” he said, and the name of the mother ship, Akademik Mstislav Keldysh, honors a Soviet cold-war rocket scientist who built ICBMs. He laughed. Everybody else laughed.

  Then he announced that he had good news and bad news. The storm of the past week was leaving. By the time they reached the wreck, in two days, they should have calm seas for launching and retrieving the subs. The bad news, he said, was that a bigger storm was on the way. They would have to leave a day earlier than planned to make it safely back to St. John’s. That meant three days of diving, instead of four. To punctuate what he had just said, Sagalevich looked at Captain Gorbach, seated at the table in his dress white uniform, who nodded.

  Kohler and Chatterton locked eyes, both of them thinking the same thing: We just lost 25 percent of our bottom time. They’d finally come to believe that Concannon had definitely seen pieces of metal peeled from Titanic’s hull. With forty years of feeling around in the underwater dark between them, they knew how hard it would be to find the ribbons of steel if Concannon’s coordinates were wrong.

  Despite Sagalevich’s bombshell, the mood of the expedition remained high. The blend of skill and expertise they had assembled was a lot better than Chatterton and Kohler had counted on when they’d made their decision to go two months earlier. Few people knew the wreck of Titanic better than Bill Lange and Ralph White. Nobody knew the Olympic class of ships better than Simon Mills. And Roger Long was the perfect choice to lead the forensic investigation once they found new evidence. Long had been fascinated with Titanic all his life but had remained outside the circle of bickering theorists. As an outsider, he would bring original thinking to his interpretation of any new evidence.

  For Chatterton and Kohler, there was no reason to make a dive unless they had a job to do. They appreciated the beauty of the sea, its creatures, its shipwrecks, and the dance of light underwater, but recreational diving was simply not in them. Neither of them, however, had ever been in a deep submersible. Even with the hoary fear of failure pinging away inside their heads, anticipating a ride in a Mir made them as giddy as the goofiest tourist.

  All wreck divers are gearheads, and a Mir submersible is the ultimate gear. No vehicle can take a human being deeper into the sea. As Keldysh steamed southeast, Sagalevich led the expedition team on a tour of his subs. White, Concannon, and Lange were Mir veterans, but for the others it was an introduction to the most amazing machine any of them had ever seen.

  The two identical Mirs were built in 1987 in Finland, but they had been completely overhauled every five years, most recently in 2004. They could dive to a depth of 19,680 feet, which allowed them to reach the bottom of 98 percent of the world’s oceans.

  Each Mir is 25.6 feet long, 11.8 feet wide, and 9.8 feet high, most of that made up of aluminum sheathing. The pressure hull—what keeps the crew alive—is a much smaller nickel-steel sphere with an inside diameter of 6.9 feet. Each Mir weighs 40,920 pounds. It can carry a payload of 640 pounds, which allows for one pilot and two observers. There are three viewing ports. The one in the middle, for the pilot, is 7.5 inches in diameter. On each side, the ports are 4.5 inches in diameter. All are Plexiglas 7 inches thick.

  Electric power comes from oil-filled nickel-cadmium batteries. The top speed forward is 5 knots. Communication on the surface is by radio; underwater, by hydroacoustic telephone, which sends sound waves through water instead of air. For navigation, an array of transponders is anchored to the sea floor at known locations determined by GPS. The transponders send out a code, and onboard receivers triangulate precise locations from those signals. The subs also have a gyro compass, a depth sounder, and an echo sounder that can acquire targets as far away as 3,280 feet. For observation and research, each Mir is equipped with side-scanning sonar with a range of 820 feet, still and television cameras, and halogen lights.

  Inside a Mir, divers are in a one-atmosphere environment, the same pressure as on the surface. Breathable air is produced as it is in a spacecraft, with lithium hydroxide scrubbers to remove carbon dioxide, and oxygen replaced from tanks. One Mir can sustain three people for about three and a half days. The Mirs have made more than 720 dives between them, and have never had to make an emergency ascent.

  Sagalevich announced the dive plan for the next day, which he had worked out with Chatterton and Kohler. In Mir-1 would be John Chatterton and David Concannon. Sagalevich made eye contact with each man as he spoke his name. Sagalevich would pilot Mir-1. In Mir-2 would be Richie Kohler and Ralph White, with Genya Cherniaev as pilot. The subs will carry a light meal of sandwiches and drinking water, Sagalevich said, adding: They have no toilets. There are piss bottles for emergencies, but it’s better to drink nothing for six hours before diving.

  At midmo
rning, two and a half days after leaving St. John’s, Chatterton and Kohler were hunched over the bottom chart of the wreck, reviewing their dive plan, when they felt the pulse of Keldysh’s engines slow from the steady throb of cruising speed. Once Titanic had been found, global positioning satellites took all the guesswork out of finding it again. As Keldysh coasted to a stop, Chatterton and Kohler knew they were hovering precisely over the wreck.

  Mir divers wear blue fireproof coveralls intended to give them an extra few seconds to put out an electrical blaze before it ignites the oxygen-rich air in the sub. Just before noon, Richie Kohler walked hand in hand with Carrie across the deck to Mir-2. The night before, when they’d put the coveralls on for the first time, Chatterton had called them hero suits. Kohler didn’t feel like a hero, but he knew he was about to enjoy one of the greatest days of his life. He waved to no one in particular, kissed Carrie, smiled, and stepped onto the ladder leading to the hatch on top of Mir-2.

  The instruments, the controls, and the cramped cockpit of the Mir spelled spacecraft to Kohler. He fought it off for a few seconds, but he couldn’t temper the sense of pride he felt. He was making a voyage to another world, realizing a dream that had captured him as a boy watching the television coverage of the first Apollo moon mission. The Saturn rocket riding a plume of fire through the sky over Florida and out into the blackness of space was the climax of the launch, but to Kohler, it was when the three men in white suits and helmets smiled and slipped into the gumdrop on top of the rocket that represented the moment of truth. For years, the courage it took to do that stuck in Kohler’s mind as the epitome of what it meant to be a man.

  In Mir-1, the hatch slammed shut above Chatterton’s head. Nothing settled him down more than knowing he was in a place that would forgive no mistakes. He felt the lurch of the crane lifting the sub out of its cradle, then looked out his viewport and saw two dozen people lining the rail, waving and applauding. He was amazed at how clear they appeared through seven inches of Plexiglas.

  Sagalevich toggled switches to sound test alarms, lit up the instrument panel, and triggered the whir of fans and pumps. Concannon talked on the radio to the launch crew on Keldysh, checking the communication circuits. Chatterton made sure the audio and video recorders inside and outside the sub were rolling. Every word spoken during the dive would be on tape.

  The subs seemed to fall rather than settle into the sea, and began rolling in the leftover chop of the departing storm. Chatterton heard a clamor on the top of Mir-1; Sagalevich looked at him, and with his fingers made a hook leaving a circle. A crewman was releasing the crane cable. The sub bobbed free, rolling and lurching, then descended into the calmer water beneath the surface.

  Chatterton lay on his side, pressed his forehead against a pad above the viewport, and watched the colors disappear from the spectrum. Red was gone at 50 feet; orange at 100; green at 400. In five minutes, the Mir passed 450 feet. Chatterton was deeper into the ocean than he had ever been on scuba. At 800 feet, he saw for the first time the strange, iridescent blue that was left after the wavelengths of the other colors had been blocked by the density of the water. At 2,000 feet, that hardy blue was gone, too, and he looked out into the eternal darkness of the sea beyond sunlight. Galaxies of bioluminescent animals flashed in the absolute darkness—chains of neon jellies; fish flashing yellow, blue, and red lights to lure prey and frighten predators; and phosphorescent plankton. Okay, Chatterton thought. Okay. There’s definitely something not right about Concannon, but at least he got me here.

  In Mir-2, Kohler was glued to his viewport for most of the two-and-a-half-hour trip to the bottom. The dive plan called for Chatterton and Concannon to land near the stern to begin looking for the ribbons of steel immediately. Kohler and White would land near the bow section and photograph it to document its condition. Microscopic organisms that feed on rusting metal were devouring the hull, and it was only a matter of time before nothing would be left of Titanic but a dark stain on the seafloor. The question was, How much time? There wasn’t anything anybody could do about it, but Titanic offered a rare opportunity to measure the phenomenon. After surveying the bow section, Kohler and White would explore the debris field around it with whatever was left of their five hours of bottom time.

  Kohler marveled at the descent into darkness, and the bioluminescent light show on the other side of the Plexiglas. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Titanic making the same plunge. The final plunge of a sinking ship was the most powerful bridge between life and death he could imagine. Kohler also knew that death by shipwreck was not instantaneous. Titanic, like most sinking ships, had gone down with pockets of air trapped inside the hull. People in them could breathe for a while, and would experience the most horrific terror until the water pressure in the depths killed them.

  There was no point in wasting electricity on the Mir’s outside lights during the descent. Inside, only the glow from the instruments gave firm dimensions to the surfaces of the sphere. Conversation in Mir-2 petered out after a half hour. To Kohler, it was a little bit like the endless hours of hanging on a rope underwater during decompression after a deep scuba dive. He entertained himself with unuttered thoughts, glancing up every once in a while to watch the orange numbers on the depth sounder tick over.

  Mir-2 was a Russian sub, so the numbers read out in meters. At 3,500 Genya Cherniaev lit up a part of his instrument panel that had been dark. He was fine-tuning his position and trimming the sub for landing. He flicked on the floodlights. The bottom was fifty feet below, and closing.

  After two and a half hours in the dark, the brown muck of the seafloor was entertainment enough for Kohler. His eyes adjusted to the brightness. The bottom was littered with unnatural objects, none of them particularly significant; they just didn’t belong there. Cherniaev nursed Mir-2 forward. The lumps and hummocks became coal, jagged bits of steel, wire, and other debris that to Kohler’s experienced eyes virtually shouted “shipwreck.”

  The lights of the sub swept through the darkness like a yellowish flashlight beam on a night trail. New terrain snapped into view as the abrupt edges of the beam reached it, then faded to black as the Mir moved on. Suddenly, without the fanfare that should have accompanied so astonishing a spectacle, the weird light fell on the bow of Titanic.

  “Oh, my God,” Kohler said, abandoning all pretense that he, one of the most experienced wreck divers who had ever lived, was not overcome with awe. “Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Look at that. Oh, man.”

  It was the railing that rendered Titanic’s bow so powerful an image, not because of the “king of the world” scene in the movie but because it humanized the wreck. Rails were there to keep people from falling off the ship. People had stood at the rails, waved good-bye, stared out at the sea. Kohler could see them. And the spare anchor! Right there on the foredeck under the arm of the still-standing crane. Ready to go. Mir-2 glided over the remains of the navigation bridge, and there were the stanchions of the helm and engine telegraphs. Cherniaev had witnessed the moment of first encounter with the bow of Titanic many times before, and he knew just where to go next for maximum effect. He gave a squirt on his tail thruster and said, “Captain Smith’s stateroom.”

  Through the ruptured ceiling of the deckhouse, Kohler saw the glimmering white ceramic rim of Smith’s bathtub. Though he knew the absurdity of his next thought, he couldn’t keep it out of his head. Kohler longed to be swimming free with a tank of gas on his back. Just to be able to touch the ship.

  In Mir-1, Sagalevich turned on his lights. After the long, passive descent, the sub was alive. They were a half mile south of the bow section, with the wreckage of the stern coming up a couple of hundred feet ahead of them. As the sub settled slowly, the bottom resolved itself as a carpet of brown mud studded with hard-looking debris. Coal. Bits of metal. Sagalevich steered Mir-1 toward the massive target dead ahead that was pinging on his sonar screen.

  The wreck that greeted Chatterton and Concannon was not as sensational as the intact st
ructures of the bow, but it was far more disturbing. It looked as if three hundred feet of a ship—the hull, superstructure, engine room, propellers, and shafts—had been thrown off a two-and-a-half-mile-high mountain onto solid concrete. Every surface sagged toward the bottom from the force of the impact, leaving only the solid steel girders of the two main engines standing in anywhere near their original shapes. The engine frames—as high as five-story buildings—loomed over Mir-1 as Sagalevich steered past the enormous pile of scrap. Finally, Chatterton saw the proof that the mess outside was really a ship: A gigantic propeller, half its diameter buried in the ancient mud of the seafloor, materialized in his viewport.

  Like Cherniaev, Sagalevich knew what the customers wanted. He gingerly nosed Mir-1 closer, until the lights fell full on one of the propeller blades, still a yellowish bronze nearly a century after it turned its last revolution. On the blade, Chatterton saw numbers gradually coming into focus. The three numbers made one figure: 401. Every wreck diver searched for positive identification of a ship—an engraved bell, a name etched into the steel of its bow, a builder’s plaque. Chatterton knew that he was looking at the builder’s hull number for one ship and one ship only.

  “I’m ready to leave here, Tolya,” Chatterton said. “You ready, Dave?”

  “Let’s go do what we came to do,” Concannon said.

  Sagalevich reset his sonar receiver with the coordinates Concannon had given him the night before. He did not get an immediate return from a target, but he adjusted his dead-reckoning course in the direction of the spot he estimated to be another half mile to the southeast. “Fifteen minutes,” Sagalevich said.

  Chatterton and Concannon remained at their viewports the whole time. They talked out of the sides of their mouths to keep from fogging the Plexiglas. Sagalevich sounded pleased when he announced that he had acquired a target: “Not big, not small. Two hundred meters.”