Shadow Divers

by Robert Kurson

  After his father told him about those steel nets, Richie went to the store and bought a U-boat model, and he painted that model until it looked as if it had been caught up in those steel nets itself. When he studied his father’s navigational charts he was amazed to see a sunken U-boat, U-853, off Block Island in Rhode Island listed along with a thrilling red-letter entreaty: WARNING—UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE. A quarter century since the U-boats had sailed and there was still something alive about them.

  On a sunny and warm day when Richie was eight, his father took him on a waterskiing trip to Dead Horse Bay in the Mill Basin waters off Brooklyn, a small area around which boats pulled water-skiers. During one of Richie’s runs, the line went slack and he fell into the water—his father had cut the engines. Kohler made a U-turn, yelling to Richie, “Get in the boat! Get in the boat!” and then plucked his son out of the water. He then began making slow circles around an object. Kohler told Richie, “Get inside the cuddy and don’t look.” Richie’s life was devoted to looking. He went into the cabin only halfway and kept watching, following the object his father circled until he could tell that it was a body, a woman—he knew it was a woman because he could see her bikini bottom. His father called the Coast Guard and continued circling. Richie looked closer. The woman was facedown, her long hair floating on the water, her legs spread, her buttocks peeking out from beneath her bathing suit, several symmetrical white flesh wounds chopped across her back and thighs. Her body bobbed in the wake of his father’s boat. Richie’s heart pounded, but he could not stop looking. He did not cry. He did not hide. He wondered how a person could be left in the ocean without anyone knowing she was there.

  As the boating season drew to a close, Richie’s father decided to learn scuba. At home, Kohler allowed Richie to assemble and disassemble his tank and regulator—he believed in making his three children feel comfortable with mechanical equipment, to make them unafraid to touch things. He threw the equipment to the bottom of the family’s above-ground backyard pool, then told Richie to swim down, assemble it, and begin breathing. The idea that Richie was able to conquer this underwater world put him on par with the divers he watched in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

  All the while, Richie continued to read. Had an observer known only his academic side, he might have pegged the kid for an egghead. Richie joined no sports teams and did not play outside with the regularity of most neighborhood boys. He spent much of his free time reading or building World War II models, which he customized with increasing detail. Yet Richie was no softie. When Richie’s father heard that a towering, Afro-headed bully named Vinnie had beaten Richie up after school, he walked the block with Richie until he found the culprit and forced his son to pummel the boy. Neighborhood kids saw Richie differently after that fight. Now word had it that if you messed with Richie Kohler he could go wild. No one bothered him much after that.

  The summer when Richie was nine, he, his father, and a dock mechanic took the family’s thirty-five-foot Viking Sport Fisherman, the Lisa Frances, for a day of party boating. By now, Richie was allowed to navigate, swim in the ocean, even mix pitchers of vodka gimlets for the adults; he was an important part of the crew. Kohler gave Richie the helm and allowed the boy to steer out of the inlet and into the Atlantic. Just ten minutes from the dock, Richie cut the wheel hard, shaking his father to attention.

  “What are you doing?” his father called out.

  “There’s a tire ahead and I didn’t want to hit it,” Richie replied.

  Kohler leaned over and looked into the water.

  “That’s not a tire,” he said.

  Richie squinted for a better look. As the boat drifted forward, he could see that the shape he believed to be a tire was in fact a man’s body. The person was facedown, arms straight out to his sides, legs dangling in the water, a black windbreaker blown over his head like a shroud. As the boat passed, the water’s wake shook the man’s head back, and Richie could see his face. His eyes were closed and he was clean shaven. His hair was in his eyes and he wore a light-colored turtleneck beneath the windbreaker. The man’s skin was white. He was dead.

  Richie’s father took the wheel and swung the boat around. “Get in the cabin and don’t look!” he ordered. Richie left the wheelhouse but kept looking. His father and the other man took a ten-foot gaff and fished the body toward the boat. The water was rough and kept tossing the corpse up and down, but the man’s arms never changed shape; they stayed in the crucifix position, away from his sides. Kohler called the Coast Guard.

  “Bring the body on board,” ordered the dispatcher.

  “Absolutely not,” Kohler responded.

  Kohler knew that by taking a body on his boat, he would be involved in a prolonged investigation, and he had no time for that. Instead, he chose to stay with the body and wait for the Coast Guard. While the authorities sped to the scene, Kohler and his friend indulged in gallows humor: “Check him for a wallet!” “Does he have any diamond rings?”

  When the Coast Guard boat arrived, it radioed to Kohler.

  “Pull the body onto your swim platform and follow us in.”

  “No way,” Kohler replied. “I’m going to let the body go unless you come and take it.”

  That idea terrified Richie more than the sight of the body. He could not endure the prospect of a dead man going adrift at sea and lost forever. He knew his father was serious. He prayed that the Coast Guard would take the body.

  The Coast Guard boat maneuvered closer in the rough water. Richie continued to stare at the dead man’s face and those arms spread at his sides. As the Coast Guard boat passed, Kohler handed off the gaff to the guardsman, who vomited at the sight. The Coast Guard boat ordered Kohler to follow it back to shore. When everyone arrived at the Coast Guard station, the body was moved to a gurney. Water dripped from the dead man’s mouth. A boy about Richie’s age ran to the gurney and cried, “My dad! My dad!” Richie trembled, using all his powers of toughness to keep from sobbing. A few minutes later, someone told the Kohlers that the victim had been caught in a storm in a sailboat and had been knocked overboard and drowned. The man, they said, was a minister.

  All the way home, Richie thought about what would have happened if he and his father hadn’t found the minister. It had been a year since he had seen the dead woman in the water, but Richie had never stopped wondering how people could be left in the water when they had loved ones at home who needed to know where they were.

  When Richie was eleven, his father finally took him diving. The men went to the dock where Kohler kept his boat. Richie checked his gauges, spit in his mask to keep it from fogging underwater, and patted his side to make sure his knife was still in place. When everything felt right, he rolled backward into the water as he had seen actors do on the TV series Sea Hunt. The New York water was dotted with foam cups and cigarettes, its surface splotched with oil and a broken umbrella, but Richie could hardly believe the beauty beneath the surface—horseshoe crabs crawled by, minnows darted, and a jellyfish drifted past on the current—and as he moved about this place where human beings were not supposed to go, where the U-boats had glided under the noses of the world, he understood that he had penetrated another realm, that he had made that astronaut leap for which he had always yearned.

  By the time Richie turned twelve his parents had separated and his father had begun dating another woman. One night in February 1975, Frances tiptoed into Richie’s bedroom, where the boy lay asleep. She woke him and handed him suitcases and told him to pack his belongings and to help his brother do the same.

  “Where are we going?” Richie asked his mother, rubbing his eyes.

  “We’re going to Florida,” Frances said. She was surprised at her answer. She had never thought about Florida before this moment.

  At two A.M., Frances put the three children into her black Buick Riviera and headed south on the New Jersey Turnpike. At a gas station, she bought maps and put Richie in charge of navigation. When daylight came, she pulled over at a rest stop an
d napped with the children. Then she continued the drive until the family arrived at her mother’s house in New Port Richey, Florida. She hadn’t told her mother she was coming. Rosalie Ruoti kissed her daughter and squeezed her grandchildren. Frances knew then that she was never going back to New York.

  A few weeks after leaving New York, Richie celebrated his thirteenth birthday at his grandmother’s home in Florida. Frances soon bought her own house nearby. By phone, Richie told his father, “I love you and you’re not here for me,” and Kohler could only say, “You know, buddy, I can’t do anything. Your mother and I don’t get along.” After a few of these calls, Richie knew that he would do the rest of his growing up in Florida.

  At fourteen, Richie enrolled in Hudson Senior High School, near his home. One day while outside for gym, a hulking muscleman of a classmate began pushing around a tall, skinny, blond kid Richie recognized from his algebra class. Richie walked over and advised the big guy to stop the bullying. The bully said, “Mind your fucking business or I’ll . . .” Richie reached his right fist back to Thirty-third Street and put it across the kid’s chin. The bully collapsed to the concrete, where he began whimpering and talking gibberish. Richie’s father was right: always swing while the other guy is telling you how he’s going to kick your ass.

  The skinny kid thanked Richie and introduced himself as Don Davidson. He invited Richie to his house after school. Don’s bedroom was revelation. Hanging from the ceiling were a half dozen models of World War II fighter aircraft, each detailed so finely they could have been mistaken in close-up photographs for the real thing. Richie lay on his back and took in the scene above him, and soon he was under bleeding Filipino skies in 1944 at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, machine guns shredding enemy wings and pilots bailing out of burning cockpits. Don was cool about Richie lying on the floor because he did the same thing all the time. On Don’s bookshelves were at least two dozen books on the Luftwaffe, Hitler’s air force. “I’m German,” Don told Richie. “I’m really into the technology of World War II—especially German engineering and their superior weapons.” Richie told Don about the Kriegsmarine—the German navy—and about how U-boats had come to New York’s doorstep, just a mile or two from his own front door. Richie told Don he was German, too. The boys were best friends already.

  After Richie and Don turned fifteen, they signed up for scuba classes and earned their junior certification. They dove constantly, spearing fish and even tangling with sharks. Richie felt every bit the astronaut underwater, free to explore worlds off-limits to the kids who sat, bored, next to him in biology class or study hall. He reveled in the finely tooled equipment that acted at once as shield and as portal to the sea. He thrived on the feeling of independence that came with spearfishing; hunters like Don and himself spent as much as an hour alone in a boundaryless world without fathers, relying only on themselves.

  Richie’s high school junior year found him drifting to the rowdy crowd. The time he had devoted to bookish study for so many years increasingly gave way to chugging Miller High Lifes on the beach, stashing weed in plastic thirty-five-millimeter film containers, and customizing his black 1974 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. He wore the uniform of the 1970s burnout: hair to his shoulders, light mustache, cutoff shorts, black rock-concert T-shirt silk-screened with glitter. In the Florida sun, his already olive skin darkened to toast. His jawline continued to square. Girls wanted to touch him. His eyebrows kept talking and talking.

  In the classroom, Richie pulled A’s and B’s, but teachers inscribed his report cards with caveats like “Doesn’t apply himself” and “Does just what he needs to do.” The street toughness stitched into him by his father showed itself eagerly. Once, when his fourteen-year-old brother, Frank, confessed to being terrorized by an adult bully, sixteen-year-old Richie pummeled the grown man until he cried. On another occasion, Richie and four junior-varsity football teammates decided to pull a prank on some seniors by lighting their gym clothes on fire through the metal grates in their lockers. The school pressed charges. In court, the judge told the boys that if they stayed out of trouble, the record would be expunged. After that, Richie kept clean.

  As the year wore on, Richie began to think about his future. He wanted no more of school—for all the pleasure he took in learning, he needed to be in the world doing, not behind more desks listening. An idea took shape in his mind. He could join the navy. In that way, he could live on the water, travel the globe, and work with the most spectacular fighting machines in the world. Maybe—and this is when his heart really started fluttering—he could work aboard an attack submarine. Not a lumbering nuclear missile sub but a sleek, fast, hunter-killer submarine.

  Late in Richie’s junior year, a U.S. Navy recruiter visited his high school as part of Career Day. Richie asked a lot of questions. The man told him there were officer-training programs available to the highest scorers on the Armed Services Aptitude Test. Those programs guaranteed training in a recruit’s area of choice—including submarines. Richie signed up for the test and took it cold. He scored at the ninety-eighth percentile. The United States Navy said they would love to have him. He asked again about submarines.

  The recruiter assured Richie that if he gave the navy a six-year commitment, the navy would guarantee him service aboard a submarine. He presented a contract that memorialized the obligation. Richie and his mother signed the papers. It had been years since his astronaut dreams had fizzled. Now, though it sounded strange, he told himself, “I’m back in the game.”

  After graduating from high school, Richie and several dozen other new recruits were taken by bus to a Florida naval air station for induction. Navy jets roared overhead. The recruits were sworn in. Richie was a member of the United States Navy.

  Later that day, an officer in a blue jacket called Richie into a room and asked him to sit down.

  “There’s a problem, son,” he said. “You lied on your application.”

  “What do you mean?” Richie asked.

  The officer explained that they had found a record of Richie’s high school arson incident. The navy had no intention of allowing anyone connected to arson to serve on board a navy ship. Ever.

  Richie’s stomach fell. He explained the prankish nature of the incident and that the judge in the case had expunged the record. The officer was unmoved. He offered to allow Richie to stay in officer training with the understanding that he could never serve aboard a naval vessel, and asked him to sign a document to that effect. Richie would not sign. A few hours later Richie was on the street, heartbroken and disoriented. He had been a member of the United States Navy for a day. Now his plans for a remarkable future had been smothered in rules and a youthful mistake. He wandered around for the next few days, taking stock of his life and wondering how he might ever replace such a lost opportunity. When he could think of nothing else to do, he decided to move back to New York to work for his father.

  For three years, Kohler worked long hours and built the mirror division of his father’s company. Not once did he touch his dive gear, which remained in storage in the basement at Fox Glass. One day he was called to a window-repair job at the Wantagh South Bay Dive Center, a scuba shop on eastern Long Island. While working, he noticed a photograph of a diver on a shipwreck. The man in the picture looked to be excavating faucets from a bathtub. Kohler asked the shop owner, a man named Ed Murphy, about the photo.

  “That’s the Andrea Doria,” Murphy said.

  Kohler had read books about the Andrea Doria and knew that the ship had sunk off New York, but he had never processed that anyone could dive it. Murphy pulled out piles of Doria snapshots. This was not the kind of wreck Kohler had seen in Florida, the type shredded by nature and surrendered to sea life. The Doria looked like a Hollywood shipwreck, with intact rooms and identifiable plumbing and echoes of life and tragedy.

  “I want to dive that,” Kohler blurted. The suddenness of his declaration surprised him—he had thought nothing about diving for three years.

  “Oh, n
o, no, no, no,” Murphy scolded. “The Doria is something you work up to. It’s at two hundred and fifty feet. It’s only for the best divers.”

  “I was the best,” Kohler said. He told Murphy about his Florida spearfishing experience.

  “This ain’t spearfishing, friend,” Murphy said. “But I’ll tell you what. I got a group of customers going out this weekend to a wreck called the USS San Diego. It’s a World War I cruiser laying in the sand, sunk by a German mine. It’s a good wreck. You can come along. It’s at a hundred and ten feet—you should be able to handle it. Bring your gear.”

  “I’ll be there,” Kohler said.

  Kohler rushed to the basement at Fox Glass. His equipment was dusty and mildewed. He unpacked and hosed off his tank, regulator, mask, and fins. The smell of mummified neoprene wafted from his suit.

  That weekend, Kohler set sail for the San Diego. When the dive boat reached the wreck site, he began to gear up. The other divers snickered and coughed. Kohler had no gloves, no hood, no boots—just a Farmer John–style wet suit that did not even cover his arms. Someone asked if he had planted corn that morning.

  “It’s freezing down there,” a diver told him. “Florida’s a long way off, kid.”

  “Ah, I’ll be all right,” Kohler said.