Chatterton was capable of diving to 230 feet. He and Nagle devised a plan. Brennan and Hildemann would throw the hook. Chatterton would splash and check out whatever was on the bottom. If it looked worth diving and the depth was reasonable, he would tie in the anchor line. If it was some crappy barge or pile of rocks, or if the depth really was 260 feet, he would trip loose the hook, return to the surface, and call off the dive. Nagle agreed.
By now, the other divers had gathered on the deck below the wheelhouse, awaiting a verdict. Nagle slid the door open, stepped out, and leaned over the rail.
“Listen, ladies, this is what I see. Whatever is down there is at two hundred twenty, two hundred thirty feet, and it’s laying low. This is Doria diving, maybe tougher. John’s going to splash first and check it out. If it’s some crap garbage barge, we don’t touch it—this shit is too deep to be diving a barge. If it’s something decent and it’s not eat-you-alive deep, we go. Either way, we wait for John. Nobody goes until John gives the okay.”
Chatterton collected his gear from the rear deck and began to suit up while Nagle attempted to hook the wreck. When the anchor caught, Nagle cut the boat’s engines. The Seeker and the mass at the ocean’s bottom were now connected. Nagle climbed down to the back deck, where Chatterton was making a final check of his gauges. Before long, everyone on the boat had gathered around the dressing table. Chatterton gave some final instructions.
“Give me six minutes, then give me slack,” he told Nagle. “That’ll give me time to shoot down and look around. If the thing is no good or too deep, I’m gonna pop two cups. If you see two cups, that means I’m not tying in and you should take up the grapple and I’ll come up with it. But if I send up one cup, that means it’s worth diving and it’s not too deep. You see one cup, take in the slack because I’m already tied in.”
Chatterton turned to the rest of the divers.
“Just to be safe, just to make sure there’s no problem, nobody splashes until I finish my deco and come back on board and brief you guys. Everyone cool with that?”
The divers nodded. Chatterton walked to the edge of the boat, placed his regulator in his mouth, pulled his mask over his face, and checked his watch. Six minutes. Nagle checked his watch. Six minutes. Nagle went back to the wheelhouse, killed the power on the loran units, and hid the bottom finder’s thermal paper graphs in a drawer. He liked these guys; they were his customers and his friends. But he didn’t risk his numbers with anyone. Yurga, Brennan, and Hildemann returned to the bow. Chatterton knelt on the rail and fell sideways into the ocean.
Chatterton swam just below the surface to the anchor line, then grabbed hold of the line and purged a bit of air from his wings to reduce his buoyancy. The current began swirling and ripping, and not just in one direction, so that the anchor line bent in S shapes and Chatterton found himself white-knuckling the line and forcing himself down two-handed in a fight to keep from being blown from the rope.
In normal seas, such a descent might have taken two minutes. Five minutes after he splashed, Chatterton was still fighting. “I’m getting my ass kicked and they’re going to give me slack before I even get down there,” he mumbled to himself. As his watch clicked six minutes, he landed on a mass of metal near the sand. White particulate matter flew horizontally past his eyes in the swirling, dark green water, a sideways white Christmas in September. In the poor five-foot visibility, he could see only specks of rust on the metal and, above him, a rounded railing and a soft corner of some kind, an oddly streamlined shape, he thought, for what was probably just a barge. But at least this wasn’t a pile of rocks. Chatterton checked his depth gauge: 218 feet. The sand below him looked to be 230 feet, the outer limit diveable by the men topside. He scanned for a high point to tie into and noticed what looked to be a strut at about 210 feet. The slack arrived, lucky to reach him through the swirling waters above. Chatterton tripped loose the grapple, swam to the strut, and tied the grapple and its fifteen feet of chain until the hook was secure. He took one white foam cup from his goody bag and released it. This dive was a go.
Aboard the Seeker, the crew at the bow scanned the waves. When Chatterton’s signal appeared, Yurga ran to the galley and threw open the door.
“He blew one cup!” Yurga yelled. “We’re going diving!”
The crew hauled in the anchor line’s slack, wrapped it snug to the bitt, and joined the rest of the divers on the Seeker’s back deck. Chatterton would likely spend twenty minutes on the bottom, meaning he would owe an hour of decompression. No one made a move for his equipment. Everyone waited for Chatterton.
At the ocean’s bottom, Chatterton clipped a strobe light to the anchor line’s chain. Sideways white particles continued to rush through the green-black ocean panorama, limiting Chatterton’s visibility to no more than ten feet. In his headlight beam, Chatterton could make out the general shape of a ship’s hull. But this hull seemed to him to have a soft roll to it, an elegant shape built not for moving cargo or pumping supplies but for gliding. At 205 feet, he reached the top of the wreck and began to pull himself forward against the current, careful to keep hold of the structure underneath to avoid being blown adrift. With every foot he moved forward, a new snapshot emerged under the interrogation of his headlight, leaving the previous scene fading to black; in this way, Chatterton’s progress over the mass was more slide show than movie. He moved slowly to digest every picture. Much of the mass lay covered in white and orange anemones, dulling the shape of whatever lay beneath. A few seconds later, Chatterton pulled himself to an area overgrown in bent and rusted pipes, a tangle of chopped and frayed electric cables a sudden haircut around it. Beneath this nest of broken equipment, bolted to the wreck, lay four undamaged cylinders, each perhaps six feet in length.
“Those are pipes,” Chatterton thought. “This is a pipe barge. Damn, this is probably a tanker or sludge barge.”
Chatterton continued along the top of the wreck. Narcosis began to hum as Muzak from the background of his brain. A few seconds later, he spotted a hatch. He stopped. Barges did not have hatches like this. He swam closer. The hatch was angled into the mass. Hatches are not supposed to be built at angles; they are meant to allow people and things to enter ships, so they are supposed to open straight down. Who would build a hatch that angled into a ship? Chatterton pushed his head inside the hatch. The interior of the mass lit white under his headlight. This was a room. He was sure because the walls were still there. A startled fish with a wide face and fang whiskers swam past Chatterton’s mask, looked him briefly in the eye, then U-turned and disappeared back into the wreck. Visibility was excellent in this enclosed space protected from ocean particulates. Against one of the walls lay a shape. Chatterton stayed motionless and took it in. “This shape,” he thought, “is unlike any other shape in the world.” Chatterton’s heart pounded. Was he seeing things? Was he more narced than he believed? He closed his eyes for a moment and opened them again. The shape was still there.
Fins. Propeller. Cigar body. A shape from scary books and terrifying movies. A shape left over from childhood’s imagination. A shape of power.
A torpedo.
A complete, intact torpedo.
Chatterton’s body heaved. He began a two-man dialogue with himself, partly to check his narcosis, partly because this was too much to discuss alone.
“I’m narced,” he told himself. “I’m at two hundred and twenty feet. I’m exhausted from fighting the current. I could be seeing things.”
“You are on top of a submarine,” he replied.
“There are no submarines anywhere near this part of the ocean. I have books. I have studied books. There are no submarines here. This is impossible.”
“You are on top of a submarine.”
“I’m narced.”
“There is no other shape like that torpedo. Remember those rolled edges you saw on the hull, the ones that looked built for gliding? Submarine. You have just discovered a submarine.”
“This is a huge dive.”
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“No, John, this is more than a huge dive. This is the holy grail.”
Chatterton pulled his head outside the hatch. A minute ago he’d had no idea where he was on this wreck. Now the torpedo had become a lighthouse. He knew that submarines fired torpedoes from both ends. That meant he was near either the bow or the stern. The current moved in the direction the torpedo pointed. If he let go and drifted with the current, he would soon arrive at one end of the wreck. At that point it should be simple to determine whether it was bow or stern. As he released his grip, the current awoke and roared so suddenly that it seemed to have been screamed from the submarine itself, an angry exhaust from a long-asleep machine now awakened. The current flung Chatterton past the anchor line, slingshotting him toward the end of the wreck. In another second he would be blown into the abyss. Instinctively, he thrust out a glove. Something solid hit his hand. Chatterton caught hold of a bent piece of metal at the tip of the wreck. Beyond that metal, there was only ocean and sand. He breathed deeply and steadied himself. The end of the wreck was before him.
Chatterton had seen photographs of submarines before. The bows were blunted and angled downward and aft, while the sterns were streamlined horizontally at the top to make room for propellers and rudder underneath. This was the bow. This was the bow of a submarine.
He looked closely at the marine growth and the deterioration of the metal on the wreck. There was no mistaking the ship’s vintage. This submarine had come from World War II. He knew from his books that there were no sunken American submarines in this area. He looked again at the wreck. For a moment he dared not think it. But it was undeniable. “I’m holding on to a U-boat,” Chatterton said out loud. “I’m holding on to a World War II German U-boat.”
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.”
Shadow Divers Page 6