Shadow Divers

by Robert Kurson

  A minute into the dive, Kohler was shivering. The green-gray water was no more than fifty degrees. When he reached the wreck he realized it was upside down, or a “turtle.” He swam along the side, looking for a way in, and finally found a compartment open to the ocean. Kohler had no training in digging or sifting or the other fine arts of excavation. He just stuffed his hand into the silt and came out with dozens of bullets. Amazing. His body began to shake from the cold. He checked his watch—he had been down only five minutes. He began his ascent lest he die of exposure. On the way up he stared at the bullets. The ammunition had traveled directly from World War I into his hands. He was hooked.

  After that, Kohler began to buy proper Northeast wreck-diving gear: dry suit, gloves, a fifty-dollar knife. He signed up for all the dive shop’s charters. He seemed to gravitate instinctively to areas rich in artifacts; often, he recovered items others had spent years passing by. He moved fearlessly about the Oregon, the San Diego, and other wrecks, and penetrated areas that scared instructors. Diving was back in his bloodstream. The fall and heave of the ocean, the grumble of the charter boat’s engines, the gray-blue of inlet waters, the white smear of the Milky Way’s reflection in the midnight water—it all reminded him of the good times he’d enjoyed as shipmate to his father, the summer years when his dad was giant and the water could take a kid anywhere.

  It seemed to Kohler that in wreck diving, a person could still go anywhere. He read in a dive magazine about a group of men who had chartered a boat in 1967 to dive the Doria. One of those men, John Dudas, had recovered the ship’s compass. To Kohler, Dudas seemed of another species. In a day when divers had no gauges, froze in wet suits, and prayed that their wristwatches did not flood, Dudas had gone to 250 feet and had taken the binnacle from inside the Andrea Doria. To Kohler, who was beginning to understand the jackhammer of narcosis and the true meaning of the word cold, Dudas was astronaut, mercenary, gladiator, and porpoise all rolled into one.

  As he accumulated experience, Kohler evolved his own brand of bravery. On one San Diego dive, he squeezed through a rotted hole into a room black with oil. In zero visibility, he filled his green mesh bags with china, lanterns, telescopes, and bugles, then divvied up the bounty to colleagues topside. The dive earned him notice in enthusiast magazines. On other wrecks—the Oregon, the Relief, the Coimbra, the Resor—he dug into silt and swam into collapsed spaces, a prescription for disorientation. He always exited with air in his tanks. More often than not, he swam out with spoils from these dangerous rooms. All the while, he developed an insatiable appetite for artifacts. The more he recovered, the more he lusted for.

  One day, Murphy called Kohler aside for a private conference. He told him of a group of six divers—a gang, really—that he believed to be Kohler’s kindred spirits. The gang had no formal name, but others called them the Thugs. They were fearsome, Murphy said, in their appetite for artifacts and their reputation for hard living. But they were also among the best divers on the eastern seaboard.

  “They dive crazy deep, Kohler,” Murphy said. “They go places no one else goes. They’re your kind.”

  “Can you introduce me?” Kohler asked.

  “Listen. Some people consider them pirates raping the shipwrecks—”

  “Now you have to introduce me,” Kohler said.

  Murphy invited the gang on one of the dive shop’s charters to the Oregon. Kohler signed up, too. Murphy made the introductions. The Thugs comprised six men—five blue-collar workers and an aerospace engineer—each of whom had at least ten years of deep-wreck diving experience. They were loud and rowdy aboard the boat, but on the shipwreck they became transformed. Kohler watched as the gang melded into a single entity, flashing hand signals and lining up for what was obviously a plan. They stuffed one member, Pinky, into a tiny hole in a cargo hold on the stern, then took turns bagging the portholes, moonshine jugs, dishes, and other artifacts Pinky extracted. Every member seemed to anticipate every other member’s movement, so that no motion was wasted and the maximum tonnage poured forth into their coffers. Kohler had never seen such teamwork. As a kid who had grown up admiring beautifully built machines, he felt as if he could watch these men work forever.

  Topside, the Thugs celebrated their haul by pounding beers, swearing at the heavens, and consuming enough cold cuts to open a floating delicatessen. Kohler showed them the two gargantuan lobsters he had captured aboard the wreck. They scoffed. “Where the hell are your artifacts? If you want to catch lobster you can stay on the goddamn jetty.” Kohler smiled and asked if he could dive with the gang again.

  The Thugs did not like outsiders, but they liked Kohler. The kid had matched them drink for drink, and he hated the same charter captains they did. Best of all, he seemed at one with their pirate sensibilities. They made him a proposition. “You’re the beermeister,” they said. “You bring the beer and you can come along on our next charter.”

  Kohler brought waterfalls of beer, and he continued bringing it for a year. He’d never known men who partied so hard. The gang raised hell in pizza joints before dives, mooned passing family vessels, wore plastic pig noses and snorted at enemy boat captains, all the while consuming booze and food in quantities that would shame a frat house. In between the fun, the gang threw an education into Kohler the likes of which a diver could not purchase for any price.

  Like army sergeants, the men stripped Kohler of his civilian equipment and began to outfit him in the gear of the great wreck diver. His harness? It sucked—buy this kind. His lights? Trash the Florida shit and buy brighter—this is the Atlantic, for Christ’s sake. His fifty-dollar knife? Too goddamn fancy; use a cheapo you won’t chase and drown for if you drop it. The lessons were clear: if a diver was going to go places no other men dared, he had better have the hardware to do it.

  Then the men set about to strip him of old thinking. They pushed him to study deck plans and photographs in order to determine a wreck’s meatiest locations; divers who barreled in and dug blindly for prizes never bagged up like a man with knowledge. They preached a group ethos whereby the gang worked together and shared the spoils; Kohler should always expect to bag another guy’s stuff or finish another’s hard labor or do whatever else it took to maximize the haul. And Kohler’s cutthroat attitude toward artifacts? Beautiful, baby, but not inside the group. Inside the group, remember this: we never fuck each other.

  The Thugs did their best teaching on the way to the wrecks, and their method was ancient and indelible. They discussed how a wreck’s tilt betrayed where its artifacts lay. They revealed the beauty of using brains and a steel wedge over brawn and a sledgehammer. They were living encyclopedias of dive accidents. They studied the sport’s close calls, bends hits, and drownings, deconstructing each incident until they understood its genesis and could intuit its prevention. After years of absorbing how other men had fucked up and died, they believed, a diver was that much less likely to do it himself.

  The divers battered Kohler with talk of survival. They taught him that so long as he was breathing he was okay. They taught him to answer a rising panic by slowing down, falling back, and talking himself through the situation. They branded into him the horror of shooting to the surface without decompressing, and when they said, “I’d rather slit my throat than take that kind of bends hit,” he believed them because they had seen men climb aboard a boat with their blood foaming and their hearts choking. They warned him—relentlessly—about the “snowball effect,” the process whereby a diver ignores a minor problem or two only to encounter other problems that combine with the earlier ones to doom him. “Always answer the first problem immediately and fully,” they said, “or you’re fucking dead.”

  Kohler took in every word. When they brought him to the most dangerous wrecks he held his own, bagged up, and stayed safe. Over the next year, he signed up for every charter the gang booked. To these men, Kohler was the young Turk, but he brought a package to the table unlike any they had seen. The kid knew no skepticism or cynicism; no goal
was impossible to Kohler, no idea too grand. He believed, for Christ’s sake, that the gang could take the bell off the bow of the Coimbra, even though that wreck was four hundred feet long and in 180 feet of freezing water and no diver had ever been to the bow before. “That’s a great way to get us killed, smart-ass,” they told him, pelting him with beer cans. Yet as much as the men laughed at the scope of Kohler’s vision, as much as they broke his balls and delighted in the shades of red he turned while insisting “It’s possible!” they found themselves challenged to ask why Kohler might not be right. A month after Kohler proposed the hunt for the Coimbra’s bell, the gang armed itself with extra tanks, devised a teamwork-driven battle plan, and became the first divers ever to explore that shipwreck’s bow. (To this day, no one has recovered the bell from the wreck.)

  One day on the way back from a dive, the divers’ discussion turned to solidarity. If the gang could add members and organize themselves, they could charter their own boats, thereby saving money and dictating destinations. It would require a commitment—a member would pay for charters whether he attended or not—but in that way the group could build real power.

  One by one, the men on the trip said, “I’m in.” The gang would need an official name. Someone suggested “Atlantic Wreck Divers.” Perfect. Someone else recommended matching windbreakers. “We’re not a goddamned bowling team” was the collective reply. How about matching denim jackets with skull-and-crossbones patches? That was more like it. Now the six original members had to elect an additional four, and the vote had to be unanimous. Only the very best divers were nominated, matching souls who had dived with the gang and shared their mind-set. When Kohler’s name was offered, four thumbs went up and two went sideways. His heart sank. No one said a word. When the two members with sideways thumbs were convinced they had sufficiently traumatized Kohler, they turned their thumbs to the sky. “Ballbreakers to the end,” Kohler thought. Beer flowed. Oaths of loyalty were sworn. The Atlantic Wreck Divers had been born.

  Around the time Kohler became an Atlantic Wreck Diver, he heard through the grapevine that his father was dating his ex-girlfriend, a woman Richie had lived with the year before. He confronted his father, who admitted it was true and that the relationship had been going on for months. Richie was devastated. For a minute he could not speak.

  “How could you?” he finally choked out.

  “I’m your father and I can do what I want,” the elder Kohler said. “If you don’t like it, there’s the door.”

  The door. If Richie walked through it there would be no coming back. In his father’s world a person who took the door could never come back. Richie’s throat lumped and his forehead flushed. His breath howled as it rushed through his nostrils. He could back down now—he could mutter some face-saving obscenity and save his job and his future and his relationship with his father, and besides, he did not love the girl anymore, and who the hell was she to push him through the door? He looked into his father’s eyes. The man did not blink. If Richie walked now he would lose this man, this strong man who knew the ocean and understood business and had toughened him to the world. Could he do it? Kohler knew his life. He could stick with anything if he knew it was right.

  “I’ll take the door,” he told his father.

  That day, Richie removed his possessions from the basement at Fox Glass. It would be years before he would see his father again.

  Now Richie had to find work. A glass salesman tipped him to a company paying top dollar and looking for someone with his experience. A few days later he was working as a mechanic for Act II Glass and Mirrors, a business that served New York’s Orthodox Jewish community. He hit it off with the owner, and four months later he was the company’s foreman.

  Over the next two years, Kohler worked hard and provided a vision for the company. The owner rewarded the effort by making Kohler a partner. Life was good again. During summers, he committed to the Atlantic Wreck Divers. The ocean had never seen anything quite like that gang before.

  Food was religion on AWD charters. Members brought along the finest cold cuts, cheeses, pepperonis, and pastries, and they did so in quantities worthy of Roman orgies. If one man brought his wife’s special tomato-and-mozzarella salad, another man would outdo him the next week with his wife’s slow-cooked pork tenderloin. The divers might even barbecue steaks, chicken, and the occasional speared flounder on the back of the boat.

  Rascality was prized even above gluttony. Often, without warning the boat captain, the gang would yell, “Swim break!” and get naked and jump into the ocean, never letting go of their beer cans as they bobbed in the water. Members brought along guns and slung stuffed animals into the air for target practice. When a black-tie party boat passed, the gang would throw beer cans at the vessel and break into their trademark ditty:

  Cat’s ass, rat’s ass, dirty old twat;

  Sixty-nine douche bags tied in a knot;

  Cocksucker, motherfucker, dicky licker, too;

  I’m a fuckin’ scuba diver, who the fuck are you?

  If the passing partygoers seemed insufficiently offended, the gang would seal the deal by mooning the boat.

  Every AWD member was known by a nickname. Pete Guglieri, the oldest and most levelheaded member, was “Emperor.” Jeff Pagano was “Hateman” for his negative outlook. Pat Rooney was “Hammer” for the tool he carried underwater, John Lachenmeyer “Swingin’ Jack” for his tendency to walk around naked, while Brad Sheard, the aerospace engineer, went by “Dick Whittler” because of the piece of driftwood he’d tried to whittle into a sailboat that had turned out looking more phallic than maritime. Kohler had earned his moniker during a discussion about Richard Pryor’s freebasing accident. Because his work took him into the most drug-infested sections of Brooklyn, he’d been able to explain to the gang the difference between cocaine and crack. After that, he was Crackhead.

  Around this time, Kohler met Felicia Becker, a dark and pretty sales clerk for one of Kohler’s glass-business customers. She understood his passion for diving. They married in the fall of 1989, and shortly after the wedding Felicia became pregnant.

  One night that year, Kohler stopped for dinner at a Spanish restaurant in Brooklyn. He was alone. As he sat at the bar he felt a slap on his back. It was his father. The two had neither seen nor spoken to each other in five years. The elder Kohler asked if he could sit down. Richie told him he could.

  “You’re going to be a grandfather,” Richie said. His father did not even know his son had married.

  Richie and his father spent hours catching up on their lives and families. Neither man mentioned Richie’s old girlfriend. His father asked him to come back to Fox Glass. Richie told him he could not work for anyone after having been a partner in his own business. His father proposed that they become partners and open their own glass company in New Jersey, and Richie accepted. He had stuck to his resolve; it was his father who had moved. He was happy to be back in the family business. He was happier to know that if he committed to something, even something so wrenching as leaving his father, he could see that decision through.

  In 1990, Kohler and Felicia celebrated the arrival of their first child, a son. Kohler worked grueling hours, then devoted his free time to Atlantic Wreck Divers. Their handmade, photocopied schedules were collector’s items in the dive community. The single-page calendar was strewn with pornographic images taken from cheap men’s magazines. Phone numbers such as 1-800-EAT-SHIT were listed as contacts. One schedule promised “beer tasting sessions, pig calling lessons, lesbian watching, automatic weapons, more beer tasting sessions, greenhorn bashing . . . as well as some great fucking diving.” Another said, “If you don’t have our numbers, we don’t want you fucking diving with us.” In the center was a list of dates, boats, and wreck destinations. Often the vessel the gang had chartered was the Wahoo, Steve Bielenda’s boat.

  For a while, Kohler had no problem using the Wahoo. But recently Kohler had clashed with Bielenda, one time nearly coming to blows. Now K
ohler needed a new boat to get to the Doria. He had dived several times with Nagle on the Seeker—to the Durley Chine, the Bidevind, and the Resor—and had long admired Nagle’s legend. And while Nagle had a reputation for crudeness and impatience, he had always treated Kohler with respect. Kohler signed up for several Seeker charters in 1990 and 1991. Though Chatterton was practically running Nagle’s business by then, he and Kohler never found themselves together aboard the boat.

  In the fall of 1991 Kohler heard word of the virgin U-boat discovery. The news stopped his life. For days, he was a blur of longing and desire, pacing the floors at home and at work, distracted from family and friends, unable to sort out the details of his yearning. Then Brennan called and said, “You’re in,” and the words lifted Kohler back to the days when his father told stories of Mr. Segal and he became proud of his last name and the way Germans built machines, and it carried him across the thousands of pages he had read about World War II and the courage of men and steel nets stretched across New York, and it ferried him over the sailboat he and his pal Don had designed to circle the world, above the navy man who had promised a submarine, beyond the gear he had used to penetrate alien worlds, and he knew that he had to be part of this virgin U-boat because for twenty-nine years it had been part of him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HORENBURG’S KNIFE

  THE SWASTIKAS on the dishes Chatterton recovered from the U-boat reached through time and chokeholded his imagination. A person could spend a lifetime studying Nazis and U-boats, and in the end it was all just information. The dishes were heavy. The swastika’s angled arms rubbed rough against a person’s fingertips; even with closed eyes one could detect the infamous shape. No one had cataloged or curated or even touched this china since the U-boat fell; the dishes had traveled from Hitler’s Third Reich directly to Chatterton’s living room, and for that unbroken path they still seemed treacherous on his mantel.