Shadow Divers

by Robert Kurson

  “John’s going to videotape,” Nagle said. “You splash after him. And don’t go forward and mess up his viz. He needs clean water to shoot in.”

  “What? Why does he automatically splash first every time? He eats all the good viz while the rest of us get silt and clouds. Where’s our fair shot?”

  “Listen, Richie,” Chatterton interjected. “You don’t know what it’s like down there yet—”

  “You’re right,” Kohler interrupted. “No one knows what it’s like because we can never go down there in good viz. I planned to go forward today, I’m looking for dishes. Now Bill tells me I gotta go somewhere else. That’s a little unfair, don’t you think?”

  “John’s going first, he’s a captain,” Nagle said. “There’s plenty of room on the U-boat, Richie. Go somewhere else on your first dive.”

  Kohler shook his head and returned to the deck, muttering patchwork expletives that all ended in the word “Chatterton.” He hated Nagle’s decision but would respect the word of a captain on his own boat. He would go somewhere else on the wreck.

  The water was calm and the skies partly cloudy when Chatterton, Packer, and Gatto splashed. They tied into the wreck just above the damaged control room, then waved good luck to one another and parted ways. Chatterton swam along the side of the submarine, searching for the saddle tanks Cooper had spoken of. He saw none. This was good evidence that the submarine was not a Type VII, and an invaluable piece of information in further researching the wreck. He would inspect the stern torpedo tubes later; to swim that distance now would consume too much valuable dive time. Instead, he would enter the wreck in the control room below him and videotape his push toward the forward torpedo room.

  As Chatterton moved to go inside the wreck he could see Packer and Gatto still hovering outside the U-boat’s torn-open control room. He knew the body language of excellent divers; the team had taken measure of the sub’s tangle of interior dangers and had decided against challenging the wreck straightaway. “Smart guys,” Chatterton thought to himself as he drifted inside. At least for now, Packer and Gatto were not going to identify the wreck.

  The control room, for all its ground-zero devastation, looked like home to Chatterton. He had studied videotapes of his last dives the way a football coach watches film, memorizing formations and openings, envisioning jogs and hopscotches that might deliver him past the myriad obstacles. He had not been to the U-boat for six weeks, but he saw order in the chaos for all his video study, and that feeling of mastery was what he had come for.

  Chatterton glided forward through the control room, crocheting himself between dangling cables, juking around dead machinery, and pointing his camera in every direction until he had passed the commander’s quarters on the port side and the sound and radio rooms to the starboard. He moved easily past the galley to the officers’ quarters, the place where he had found the dishes in late September. Now it was time to push toward the forward torpedo room, the U-boat’s forwardmost compartment. But the navigational videos he had memorized from previous trips went snowy in his brain; he had never been this far forward. If he was to continue forward, he would have to do so by guts and instinct.

  Video camera raised high in the compartment, Chatterton moved his fins and inched forward. A wooden partition materialized before him; the path to the torpedo room was blocked by a fallen piece of cabinetry. Chatterton swam closer. He allowed the water around him to still. Slowly, he raised his right arm to shoulder level and opened his palm, then held the position motionless, as if he were a python about to strike at prey. When everything in the compartment settled, he thrust his arm forward, crashing his hand into the partition. The wood exploded, spitting a cloud of sawdust and debris about the room. Chatterton froze and allowed the dying wood its fall. When the bulk of the particulate matter had sunk to the floor and some of the visibility returned, he could see the circular hatch leading to the torpedo room at the front end of the U-boat. He moved his fins and again crept forward.

  Now he hovered in the noncommissioned officers’ quarters, the place where crewmen like the navigator, chief machinist, and senior radioman slept. Chatterton remembered from Chicago that there might be dishes and other artifacts in the compartment. He scanned the debris and sediment piled on the port-side floor area for the familiar white of china. He saw the white. He inched closer. This was a different white. He moved still closer, until the white became a round shape with eye sockets and cheekbones and a nasal cavity and an upper jaw. This was a skull. Chatterton stopped. He allowed some silt to settle. Beside the skull lay a long bone, perhaps a forearm or shin, and beside it several smaller bones. Chatterton recalled the open hatches atop the submarine. If men had attempted to flee this U-boat, at least some of them had never made it out alive.

  Now Chatterton faced a decision. He had been advised by some to search pockets, boots, and other personal effects he might discover inside the sub—those were the likeliest places to find a silver wristwatch or a wallet inscribed with a crewman’s name, or maybe a cigarette lighter or cigarette case a crewman had taken to a silversmith to have his U-boat’s number engraved on it. Chatterton knew that clothes and personal effects often lay near bones. He did not move. If he searched for personal effects, however carefully, he might disturb the human remains, and he was not willing to do that. He had contemplated this possibility after discovering the dishes and realizing that the boat had likely sunk with crewmen aboard, and in every iteration he came out resolved the same. This was a war grave and these were fallen soldiers. He knew firsthand what fallen soldiers looked like and what a fallen soldier meant in a world of wars and maniac leaders; he had seen life pass from young men defending their country and knew that whatever the politics or justness of a country’s cause, a soldier deserved respect in death. He also understood that he might someday have to answer to a family about the bones before him, and he was unwilling to say that he had shuffled those remains in order to identify a shipwreck and maybe gain himself a little glory.

  Chatterton turned his head away from the skull so as not to stare. He kicked his fins and moved forward, allowing the remains to fade back to blackness behind him. A moment later the forward torpedo room took shape in the distance. As Chatterton drifted closer, he could see that the room’s round hatch—the hole through which crewmen had moved in and out—was open but blocked by a piece of fallen machinery. Chatterton lifted the obstruction, moved it aside, and swam into the compartment. Two torpedoes, including the one he had seen from atop the submarine on the Labor Day discovery trip, lay poised and pointed forward, seemingly as ready for firing as they had been during World War II. Only the top two of the room’s four torpedo tubes were visible; the other pair lay underneath several feet of silt and debris that had piled up and into the middle of the room. Chatterton knew from research that the torpedo-tube hatches were sometimes marked by identifying tags. He also recalled that the torpedomen often wrote their nicknames or the names of girlfriends and wives on the outside of the hatches. He swam forward and searched for such evidence, but any trace of a tag or writing on the hatches had been eaten away by time and seawater. This wreck, even at its tip, refused to surrender its secret.

  Chatterton panned his camera around the room in slow motion, capturing as much detail as possible for later study. The bunks that had once hung from the port and starboard walls no longer existed. The boxes of food and supplies that the torpedomen slept beside or atop in this compartment had vaporized long ago. The rigging, used to move the massive torpedoes into their firing tubes, lay fractured in the sediment. A white speck caught his eye. He aimed his light at the shape. Fish scurried through cracked machinery to escape the brightness. In the light he saw a human bone, then another, then dozens more. Many men had died in this room, the place farthest from the cataclysmic control-room damage. “Jesus, what happened to this ship?” Chatterton mumbled through his regulator. He turned around to leave. Before he could begin his swim out he came face-to-face with a femur, the largest a
nd strongest bone in the human body. He averted his gaze and drifted past it slowly until he had exited the torpedo room.

  The postscript to Chatterton’s entrance was a swirling black silt that reduced visibility to zero. To exit the wreck, he would have to follow a map that existed solely in his brain. Chatterton began picking and finger-walking his way through the compartments, reversing memorized pathways and anticipating remembered dangers. Passing through the noncommissioned officers’ quarters, he hugged the sub’s starboard side in order to leave undisturbed the human remains he had seen while coming in. In nearly total darkness he moved through spaces other divers would not tempt on foot in a well-lit gymnasium. Again, he survived by favoring learning over artifacts. Again, preparation delivered him from a web of obstacles and traps. Chatterton exited the wreck through the control room, swam toward the flashing strobe he had clipped to the anchor line, and began a ninety-minute ascent to the surface.

  Still steaming over Chatterton’s dibs on the U-boat’s forward section, Kohler decided to explore aft instead. Remembering an area of damage on top of the wreck’s stern, he wondered if he might gain entrance to an unexplored section there. His instincts were excellent. The damaged area had been blasted open by some external force—he could see that much because the metal had been forced down and into the U-boat—and while the damage was nowhere near as extensive as that in the control room, it left enough room for a courageous diver to drop in and land where he might. Kohler hovered above the open wound, burped a breath of air from his buoyancy compensator, and sank into the U-boat.

  As Kohler settled into the wreck, he detected the outline of two adjacent torpedo tubes in the haze of his white light. At once he understood where he was and the implication of his discovery: this was the aft torpedo room inside what was likely a Type IX U-boat, the kind built for patrols of longer range and duration. Though Chatterton had intended to inspect the stern torpedo tubes himself, Kohler had beaten him to it. In just a half hour, the two divers had answered the two most important technical questions about the mystery U-boat.

  Kohler shined his lights about the room. Under some fallen debris he found a metal tag and an escape lung, the combination life vest and breathing apparatus used by crewmen to escape a submerged U-boat. Kohler’s pulse raced. These were just the kinds of items that often bore identifying marks. He pulled them close to his mask. Any writing that might have been embossed on the tag, however, had been eaten away by nature. The lung, small technical marvel though it was, came up blank as well. Kohler packed the items in his goody bag and began a short swim aft to get a closer look at the torpedo tubes. Like Chatterton, he knew that the tube hatches had often been tagged and sometimes bore the names of the crewmen’s loves.

  Kohler never got to the tubes. During his swim, he noticed the edge of a white dish protruding from the debris on the floor. Pay dirt! He would score some china after all. He crab-walked toward the dish, careful not to raise any more silt than was necessary. Would the china contain the eagle and swastika? Could this be his greatest discovery of all? Kohler had to force himself not to lunge forward and start grabbing. Slowly, slowly, slowly. Finally, he completed the ten-foot swim. He suggested his hand forward and put the gentlest of squeezes on the china. The dish bent forward. Kohler let go. It sprung back into shape. Kohler understood at once. He had made the prize-winning discovery of a Chinette plate, something not invented until thirty years after the last U-boat had sailed. New divers are often surprised to find such modern objects aboard old shipwrecks, but a veteran like Kohler had seen Budweiser cans, plastic prescription-medicine bottles, a Kotex applicator, even a Barney the Dinosaur balloon on hundred-year-old wrecks, and he understood that such objects had been dropped off passing boats and had drifted along the ocean bottom until they got caught up in a wreck. Kohler removed the plate and stuffed it in his goody bag, the underwater equivalent of picking up a hot-dog wrapper in a park. Silt spilled around the hole he made. Another white object came into view. This one was no paper plate. This one was a femur.

  Kohler went cold. Unlike Chatterton, he had rehearsed no plan for dealing with human remains. He had never seen bones on a wreck before this. And he had never faced a moral decision at 230 feet with narcosis banging. He knew this: he was no grave robber. He would not disturb bones to get artifacts. But should he dig nearby? That was a different story. Nearby was different. He looked again at the femur. He turned even colder. His breathing became more rapid.

  Kohler backed away several inches, and in his movement the silt swirled black and buried the bone as quickly as it had been revealed. He had spent the last six weeks learning about U-boat men. He had come to sense the punishing and tedious nature of their work, the constant peril of their patrols, the hopelessness of their late-war situation. All that, however, was an experience of the mind. Here was a femur, the strongest of human bones, torn free from what had once been a human being. That bone was the bridge between book and imagination, and it stopped Kohler. Soon his coldness was replaced by a pall of regret. He found himself thinking, “I didn’t mean to disturb you” as he watched the area where he had seen the bone. He decided to return to the Seeker. Kohler worked his way forward until he was under the damaged opening at the ceiling, injected a bit of air into his wings, and ascended out of the U-boat.

  A few minutes later he began his ninety-minute ascent up the anchor line. For a while, he contemplated the fate of a U-boat in which men had died so far away from the boat’s epicenter of damage. But as his decompression continued, the crescendo of his frustration with Chatterton renewed. He could not tolerate the idea of this diver stealing the visibility in a gold mine of artifacts under the pretext of shooting video. A mystery U-boat full of china and the guy is shooting video!

  As Kohler climbed aboard the Seeker, divers gathered to inspect the tag and escape lung he had recovered. Some told him of Chatterton’s push to the forward torpedo room. Kohler had heard enough. He decided to have another word with Nagle.

  In the wheelhouse, his dry suit still dripping, Kohler explained to Nagle that his culture was Atlantic Wreck Divers to the core, an ethos in which divers worked as a team for the good of the group, none of this me-first-every-time bullshit. Chatterton entered the room behind him. Kohler rolled his eyes. Chatterton shut the door and spoke in a near whisper.

  “I saw skulls up front,” he said.

  “I saw a long bone, a femur, in the back,” Kohler answered.

  “There are a lot of bones up front,” Chatterton said.

  “Did you videotape the skull?” Kohler asked.

  “No. I didn’t videotape any of the bones.”

  “What? You didn’t videotape the bones? You steal the viz so you can shoot video, then you come across human remains and you don’t tape them? What the hell were you doing down there?”

  For a moment Chatterton said nothing. Nagle waved his hand as if to say, “Leave me out of this.”

  “I deliberately did not video them,” Chatterton said. “It’s a matter of respect.”

  Kohler begrudgingly nodded his agreement and left the wheelhouse. In the salon, he fixed himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and relaxed. He would need to spend three hours off-gassing his body’s built-up nitrogen before he could splash for a second dive. Chatterton entered a few minutes later, popped his videotape into the VCR, and studied his first dive. Neither said anything to the other.

  Chatterton was the first to return to the water. His goal was to search the area around the galley and the noncommissioned officers’ quarters for cabinets that might contain the ship’s logbook, maps, or other written materials like those he knew had been safely stored in wooden furniture on the Chicago U-boat. He would avoid the forward section of the NCO quarters so as not to disturb the human remains he had seen there.

  Chatterton had little trouble reaching his target area. He got purchase on some low-lying machinery and began digging, feeling around for cabinet shapes. He found none, but he did run his hand along a
smaller object he took to be a box. A moment later he had unearthed the item from beneath a pile of silt and sediment. It appeared to be a silverware drawer about eleven inches by eight inches, with sections for knives, spoons, and forks. A gelatinous black mud had cocooned the drawer and had sealed its contents. Chatterton looked closer and saw the outline of spoons in one of the sections. He nestled the silverware drawer into his bag and turned back for the anchor line. Perhaps there might be a date or year stamped on one of the utensils inside.

  Not long after Chatterton had departed the sub, Kohler entered. This time, he beelined to the forward part of the wreck, exactly where Chatterton had recovered the dishes on the last trip. If he had to deal with Chatterton’s silt, so be it. He was going to bag up.

  The visibility was not as bad as Kohler had expected; he could see landmarks, and to an Atlantic Wreck Diver landmarks meant life. He navigated through the last remnants of Chatterton’s haze and into the noncommissioned officers’ quarters, a penetration only he and Chatterton dared risk on so virgin a wreck. He poked through sediment and debris, looking for the rounded white corners and feeling for the smooth surfaces that meant china to savvy divers. He found a four-inch-tall cologne bottle imprinted with a German word, Glockengasse, which he took to be a brand name. He remembered that U-boat men splashed cologne on themselves to battle the body odor inevitable on hundred-day patrols in broiling boats in which showers were unavailable. But he had not come for cologne; he had come for dishes. He resumed his search in earnest, running his hand through silt and sediment the way a child works a sandbox. He found nothing. He dug farther. As he cleared some debris he came upon what he could only describe to himself as a boneyard: skulls, ribs, a femur, shins, a forearm. That cold settled over him again. “I’m standing in a mass grave,” he told himself. “I need to leave now.” He packed the cologne bottle into his bag and turned around. The silt worsened from haze to black. Kohler breathed deeply and shut his eyes for a moment. Navigate. As long as you can breathe you’re okay. He remembered his way and reversed it in his mind. He maneuvered back out of the U-boat as if following a trail of lighted bread crumbs. The Atlantic Wreck Divers had taught him well.