Rubber-soled shoe amid the wreckage in the officers’ quarters. Crewmen wore soft shoes during attacks in order to stay silent to enemies.
JOHN CHATTERTON
Bill Nagle, captain of the Seeker, grants another interview after the 1991 discovery of a mystery German U-boat in New Jersey waters makes international news.
JOHN CHATTERTON
U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
Forward torpedo room of U-505, on display in Chicago. It was in this compartment on the wreck that Chatterton expected to recover an identifying tag. (Inset) A torpedo tube hatch on U-Who.
RICHIE KOHLER
Mud-entombed silverware drawer recovered by John Chatterton. At the bottom lies a knife with a crewman’s name hand-carved into the handle.
KEVIN BRENNAN
John Chatterton holding Horenburg’s knife.
JOHN CHATTERTON
A closer view of Horenburg’s knife.
JOHN CHATTERTON
A valve from the U-boat’s interior.
JOHN CHATTERTON
Metal schematic diagram discovered by Chatterton. It was this artifact that confirmed the U-boat’s type and the shipyard at which it was built.
RICHIE KOHLER
A few of Richie Kohler’s U-Who artifacts, including a metal schematic diagram, the face of the diesel motor room telegraph, directions for use of a survival kit, and a glass bottle for cologne, which submariners used to mask the odors of months at sea.
JOHN CHATTERTON
One of the U-boat’s steel hatches, likely blown open by the force of an immense explosion.
NOVA /WGBH-TV BOSTON
Tight squeeze: Richie Kohler entering the diesel motor room through a control room hatch.
SUSAN ROUSE
Chris Rouse, left, and son Chris Rouse, Jr., aboard the Seeker after diving the Andrea Doria in 1992.
JOHN CHATTERTON
Chrissy Rouse’s penetration line, tangled after his desperate attempt to escape the U-boat.
JOHN CHATTERTON
One of the Rouses’ scuba tanks, still lying on the wreck after their fateful dive.
RICHIE KOHLER
Reunited. Richie Kohler and John Chatterton in the summer of 1996, after Kohler’s self-imposed exile from diving.
“You and Danny take the boat,” Nagle said, ice clinking in the background. “I don’t give a shit. Go without me.”
On the night of October 10, the divers gathered at the Seeker’s Brielle dock. No one had to ask why Nagle was not in the wheelhouse.
While the other divers tied down their gear, the Rouses began their bickering. This time their argument was a bit more serious than usual. Neither father nor son could afford trimix for the trip—they would be forced to breathe air, a savings of a few hundred dollars.
“Chrissy was supposed to buy the mix this time,” Chris sniped.
“No, it was the old man’s turn,” Chrissy countered.
“Was not.”
“Was too.”
“Cheapskate.”
“Miser.”
And so on into the evening.
The next morning, Chatterton and Kohler splashed first, as had become their custom. While Kohler explored the NCOs’ quarters, Chatterton returned to the forward torpedo room in search of more tags. He found a few made of plastic, but none with identifying information. On the way out, he spotted a bent piece of aluminum about the size of a tabloid newspaper lying amid a pile of wreckage. Ordinarily, he would have ignored such junk. This day, something urged him to pluck it from amid the garbage and drop it into his bag. Chatterton gave the artifact no more thought as he began his ascent to the Seeker.
Topside, Chatterton emptied his bag. The aluminum piece, Swiss-cheesed by rust and splotched with marine growth, clanged onto the dressing table. Yurga walked over to inspect it. Chatterton opened the bent metal as if it were a magazine. Engraved on the inside were technical diagrams—a schematic illustrating the mechanical operations of some part of the U-boat. Chatterton grabbed a rag from a bucket of fresh water and wiped it across the artifact. The sea growth lifted easily, revealing small German inscriptions along the tattered bottom edge. Chatterton pulled the schematic toward his face. He read, “Bauart IXC” and “Deschimag, Bremen.”
“Hold everything,” Yurga said. “Deschimag-Bremen was one of the German U-boat construction yards. That means this wreck was a Type IXC built at Deschimag-Bremen. There couldn’t have been more than a few dozen Type IXs built there during the entire war. This is huge for our research.”
Kohler surfaced a few minutes later. Like Yurga, he understood the magnitude of the discovery.
“This is really going to narrow things down,” Kohler said, slapping Chatterton’s back. “All we have to do is go home, check our books, and we’ll have the short list of IXCs built at Deschimag. It’s gorgeous.”
The divers splashed again that day but found little. Their minds, in any case, were on Chatterton’s spectacular find. That evening over dinner, as the Seeker rocked in the waves while anchored to the U-boat, the Rouses admired the schematic and told Chatterton about their day. They had nearly excavated the piece of canvas covered in German printing and believed they might be a dive away from bringing it topside. Optimism echoed off the salon walls. The divers wished one another a good night. In a single day, a season of dead ends had transformed itself.
The Atlantic recused itself from the divers’ optimism. As men slept aboard the Seeker, the ocean turned the vessel into a bathtub toy, tossing some divers from their bunks and forcing the captains, Crowell and Chatterton, to consult the weather radio. Conditions were snotty with five-foot waves, and the forecast had changed for the worse. At 6:30 A.M. Chatterton walked down to the salon and roused the divers.
“It’s getting nasty out there,” Chatterton said. “Anyone thinking of diving best get going now. After that, we’re pulling the hook and going home.”
“You diving, John?” someone asked.
“Not on a day like this,” Chatterton said.
Of the fourteen divers on the trip, just six moved from their bunks to gear up. Kohler was first and dressed without hesitation. A half hour later he rolled into the ocean. The dive team of Tom Packer and Steve Gatto followed, as did New Jersey State Trooper Steve McDougal. The Rouses also rolled out of bed.
“I’m not diving, forget it,” Chrissy said, peering out a cabin window. “Too rough out there.”
“You pussy!” his father bellowed. “You got no backbone, kid.”
“Didn’t you hear, old man?” Chrissy asked. “Chatterton said the weather’s nasty and getting worse. Can’t you feel it out there?”
“If you can’t dive these conditions, you got no business being out here,” Chris said. “I can’t believe you’re my son. You’re an embarrassment!”
“Okay, you old crow,” Chrissy said. “You want to go diving? We’ll go diving. Let’s go.”
For a moment Chris said nothing.
“Ah . . . that’s okay,” Chris finally said. “I was just jerking your chain. It really is too rough. Let’s pass.”
“Too rough? Maybe too rough for you, you old geezer,” Chrissy said, taking the offensive. “If you’re too soft to go diving, I’ll go myself. You stay here with the women.”
“You’re not going without me,” Chris said. “If you go, we both go.”
“You guys are too much.” Chatterton laughed, leaving the salon. The Rouses continued bickering as they decided what to have for breakfast, whether to shave, how long their dive should last. Chris jokingly ordered Barb Lander, the only woman aboard, to fix his breakfast and wash his dishes.
As the Rouses geared up they reviewed their plan. Chrissy would return to the galley to free the piece of canvas containing the German writing. It was stuck beneath a floor-to-ceiling steel cabinet. Chris would wait outside the wreck, his lights a beacon for his son’s exit. Chrissy would work for twenty minutes before exiting the wreck. At the dressing table, the Rouses aff
ixed their trademark hockey-style helmets and started for the gunwales. Waves battered the Seeker’s stern, knocking the flipper-footed Chrissy onto his side like an overtired toddler. Yurga forklifted him under the arms and stood him upright. Another wave rocked the boat. This time Chrissy did a face-plant onto the deck.
“Hey, Chris,” Yurga yelled. “Your kid keeps missing the ocean!”
Finally, Chrissy made it over the gunwale, his father followed, and their dive was under way. It took just a minute or two before the team hit the wreck and made their way from the anchor line to the opening gouged in the control-room area. There, Chrissy unfastened the two small stage bottles he would breathe from on his ascent and laid them on the U-boat’s deck. Next, he clipped one end of a nylon line to the torn-open entrance of the U-boat and slithered into the wreck, allowing the line to unspool from a reel attached to his harness. This way, even if the visibility dropped to zero or he became lost or disoriented, he could follow the line out of the U-boat and back to his father. Cave divers like the Rouses called this technique “running a line” and made it their religion. Wreck divers, however, did not believe in depending on nylon lines—or anything else—that could become tangled or cut inside a wreck’s jagged guts.
It took Chrissy just a minute or two to snake into the galley and begin his work. The pillowcase-sized piece of canvas he had worked on for so long still lay buried under the skeleton of a floor-to-ceiling cabinet made of heavy-gauge steel. Chrissy could not hope to move the massive cabinet. To free the artifact he would have to dig beneath the cabinet into the rotting debris until enough space had been cleared to pull the canvas out. For perhaps fifteen minutes, Chrissy burrowed with his hands, creating a silt tornado that blackened the room and dropped the visibility to zero. He kept digging and pulling. The canvas began to loosen from beneath the cabinet. Chrissy pulled harder. Mushroom clouds of silt exploded within the compartment. The jungle drums beat louder. He pulled again. More canvas came free, then even more, and it kept coming, like the scarves in a magician’s trick, while the drums pounded louder and Chrissy grew closer to solving the mystery. Perhaps just seconds remained in the dive. Chrissy pulled again. The steel cabinet, now deprived of its bottom support, began to collapse, hurtling several hundred pounds of steel atop Chrissy’s head and burying his face in the hole he had dug. Chrissy tried to move. Nothing happened. He was trapped.
As the gravity of his situation sludged into Chrissy’s consciousness, the feral dog that is narcosis leaped from its cage and set upon him with fangs fully bared. His head throbbed. His mind narrowed. He believed, more certainly than he knew his name, that a monster was on top of him, pinning him. He tried again to move but could not—in its collapse, the cabinet had wedged between other debris and had become part of an interlocking sarcophagus atop the diver. Outside, Chris checked his watch and saw that his son was overdue. He had not planned to penetrate the U-boat. He was unfamiliar with the area in which Chrissy was working. He swam into the wreck.
Chris reached his son and began working to free him from the trap. Chrissy struggled to climb out but only burned faster through his remaining air and deepened his narcosis. Chris kept working. Finally, after several minutes, Chrissy came free of the cabinet. Father and son now needed to exit the wreck. Chrissy checked his watch. It read thirty minutes. He and his father were ten minutes over on their time.
Ordinarily, the Rouses would have followed Chrissy’s nylon line out of the wreck and to the tanks they needed to breathe from to make their ascent. But in Chrissy’s struggle to free himself, the line had become tangled around the canvas until it was a morass of knots. Narcosis banged like an industrial press inside Chrissy’s brain, tunneling his peripheral vision and lighting the panic fuse of his instincts. He and his father swam in the direction of the control room and managed to exit the submarine through a crack between its skin and bulkhead. The tanks and the anchor line were now in front of the divers and just forty feet away. All the Rouses had to do was swim aft, locate the bottles, and begin their ascent. In the struggle, however, Chrissy had likely become disoriented and believed himself to be facing the wrong direction. He turned around and swam toward the bow—directly away from the tanks and anchor line. His father followed.
The Rouses searched frantically for their tanks. Chris, who had dropped only one of his stage bottles outside the wreck, gave the remaining one to Chrissy. A minute passed and the Rouses kept searching, but they were now 150 feet from their stage bottles and their narcosis was spiraling deeper by the second. Two minutes passed, then three, then five—still, they could not find their tanks. They searched for another five minutes, never knowing that they were turned around and nowhere near the stage bottles or anchor line. Chrissy checked his watch. He had been underwater for forty minutes. The Rouses were now twenty minutes over their dive time. Their required decompression, originally sixty minutes, had now expanded to two and a half hours. Neither had enough air to breathe for that long.
A clear-thinking diver breathing trimix likely would have used his remaining gas to eke out the best decompression possible. The Rouses, however, had made this trip without trimix and were breathing air. Chrissy, terrified at losing his stage bottles and lost on the wreck, made a decision that divers spend a lifetime dreading—to bolt for the surface. His father shot up after him. Nagle had a saying about divers who rocketed to the surface after so long down deep. “They’re already dead,” he would say. “They just don’t know it yet.”
The Rouses missiled toward the surface. At about 100 feet they intersected a miracle. Somehow, in their explosive ascent, they spotted the anchor line, swam to it, and held on. Now they had a chance. They could fashion a decompression from their remaining air, then switch to the oxygen tank the Seeker dangled at 20 feet for emergencies.
Chrissy switched from his main tanks to the stage bottle his father had given him. He sucked from the new tank and gagged—the mouthpiece had torn and was delivering water, not air. That was enough for Chrissy. He switched back to the main tanks on his back and bolted again for the surface. Again, his father followed. This time, Chrissy would stop for nothing.
In the Seeker’s wheelhouse, Chatterton, Kohler, and Crowell checked the weather and shivered—brutal seas and nasty winds were rolling in. A minute later they saw two divers pop to the surface about a hundred feet in front of the boat. Chatterton looked closer. He saw the hockey-type helmets of the Rouses. They had come up an hour ahead of schedule.
“Oh, Christ,” Chatterton said. “This ain’t good.”
Chatterton and Kohler tore down the wheelhouse steps and onto the Seeker’s bow. Chatterton raised his arm and put his fingertips on his head, the universal “Are you okay?” signal to divers. Neither man responded. Six-foot waves threw the divers closer to the boat. Chatterton and Kohler looked into the men’s faces. Both father and son had the wide, rapidly blinking eyes of the newly condemned.
“Did you complete your decompression?” Chatterton yelled.
Neither diver answered.
“Swim to the boat!” Chatterton yelled.
Chrissy moved his arms and inched closer to the Seeker. Chris also tried to swim, but he flopped sideways and half-kicked like a sick goldfish.
“Chrissy! Did you complete your decompression?” Chatterton pressed.
“No,” Chrissy managed to yell back.
“Did you come straight to the surface?”
“Yes,” Chrissy said.
Kohler went ashen at the answer. He remembered the Atlantic Wreck Divers’ mantra: I would rather slit my throat than shoot to the surface without decompressing.
Chatterton grabbed two throw lines to fling to the Rouses. The Seeker rose and fell on the raging waves like a carnival ride, each undulation threatening to launch Chatterton and Kohler into the Atlantic. An eight-foot wave pushed Chrissy under the Seeker as her bow lifted off the ocean like an executioner’s ax. The Seeker fell from the darkening sky, Chrissy helpless to move away. Chatterton and Kohler held
their breath. The boat’s splash rail hurtled downward and bashed the regulator on Chrissy’s tanks, just inches from his skull, splitting the brass mechanism and releasing an explosion of rushing air from the tanks. Chatterton threw the lines. Each of the Rouses managed to grab a rope. Chatterton and Kohler pulled the divers along the side of the boat, towing them out from under the Seeker and toward the stern. Crowell ran into the wheelhouse.
He radioed the Atlantic City Coast Guard repeatedly but got no reply.
“Fuck this,” he thought to himself. “I’m calling a Mayday.”
“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” Crowell called into his handheld microphone. “This is the vessel Seeker. Requesting immediate helicopter evacuation. We have injured divers. Please acknowledge.” The Brooklyn Coast Guard station responded. They were sending a chopper.
Chatterton, Kohler, and other divers continued to tow the Rouses toward the back of the boat as the Seeker’s bow rose and fell with thunderous booms. Chris came around nearest the ladder. Chatterton rushed toward him.
“Chris, get up the ladder!” Chatterton yelled.
“Take Chrissy first,” Chris grunted.
Chatterton began to insist but stopped himself when he looked into Chris’s widened eyes. In them, he saw only fear and knowing—the kind of knowing that occurs when one’s fate is certain and moments away.
“Okay, Chrissy, come up!” Chatterton yelled to the younger Rouse, who was holding on to a line about ten feet behind his father. The divers pulled Chrissy to the ladder. He screamed in pain.
“I can’t move my legs!” Chrissy yelled. “Monkeyfuck! Monkeyfuck! It hurts! It hurts so bad!”
Chatterton knew that serious decompression bends were already upon the divers. He and Kohler straddled the gunwale on either side of the ladder and put their arms under Chrissy, grabbing the underside of his tanks for leverage. The Seeker rose and fell with nature’s onrushing tantrum, each explosion against the ocean threatening to catapult the divers overboard and crush Chrissy under the stern. The lactic acid in Chatterton’s and Kohler’s muscles burned as they willed themselves to hang on to the stricken young diver. Between impacts, they managed to lug Chrissy up the ladder until he thudded onto the deck like a netted tuna.
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