Diving Deep

by P D Singer

  Maintaining neutral buoyancy was second nature after all these years. The extradeep breath or slight finning correction barely needed his conscious thought. He eyeballed the second line down to the anchor. Have to find that and mark it, or someone would be coming down the other way to meet him in the middle.

  Luck or good planning let Bobby find it in a few minutes, and once he’d tied his line off, he released five cups. If the current didn’t play with them all the way to Florida, his buddies would know all was ready.

  Now to explore. He wasn’t waiting for the others—if they found him, they found him, but this was his site. His. Pristine, untouched, perhaps, since it sank to the bottom of this shallow stretch of continental shelf, however many years ago. The secrets that lay beneath the life of this artificial reef were his to unfold.

  Because Lee brought them on a plate. That joker Johnny Ray had helped, but this was Lee’s doing.

  Bobby couldn’t think about Lee now while the pressure of the water crushed his dry suit into flat wrinkles against his skin and sat on his chest like an elephant, daring him to breathe. One hundred twenty feet of ocean between him and all the air he could desire, and he’d lost his window for safe, undecompressed ascent.

  Not that he expected to need it.

  The metallic ting of tools against tanks alerted him to his companions’ arrival. Two quick raps on his tank acknowledged their presence, but Bobby wouldn’t waste a minute of precious bottom time turning around to find them. Hundreds of dives on their logs—they’d manage just fine on their own. Whatever wonders they’d find here, great, though Bobby wanted to find them first.

  He finned through the light current roiling over the top of the wreck, scanning from side to side. The camera on his goggles would pick up detail he might miss now. Lee would want to see everything.

  The guy had been one hell of a diver. Good as Bobby. Maybe good as Rafe. Or would have been, except….

  Keep your mind on business, asshat. The ocean wouldn’t care if it killed him. Lee’d be a bit put out if Bobby allowed it to happen.

  A hundred kinds of critters obscured the details of his find. Identification wouldn’t be as simple as reading numbers or letters off the side of the wreck. Bobby finned on, halfway down the ridge. Slow was fine; he’d find markings or a shape he’d recognize.

  Smooth ridge gave way to a more buckled, concave area with dark openings. Bobby hovered, aiming his flash into the dark. Trying to get a good angle on the gaps with the camera, he peered in. Tangles of wire waved with the passage of water, dangers ready to catch any diver who’d dare to venture in. He couldn’t see much: some beams, something large and square. Not an attractive entrance. They’d have to enlarge it or find another way in. But not shedding plastic bags and tin cans either.

  This entire depression needed scanning—more potential gaps presented themselves. Bobby let the slight current drift him to the edge of the ragged bowl, which merged with the edge of the hull. And he looked over.

  Fuck! A stretch of the hull projected twelve or fifteen feet, curving to make a column twenty feet wide. Wire and rails made shadows, moving with the carpet of sea life below them. A long pipe, coated as thoroughly as the hull, jutted down to the sea floor.

  Bobby had seen this shape in a thousand pictures, scores of movies. Every war flick he’d cared enough to watch featured this boat, free of living creatures on its sleek seal shape. Calm as he willed himself to be, his heart still raced, and he sucked at his air supply. He’d found the relic of a lifetime.

  Because that had to be a conning tower. This hulk was a submarine.

  Bobby scanned back and forth across the tower, the camera recording even though his mind had quit. They’d found a submarine.

  The queeping of his dive computer tore him away from his perusal. Time, he needed more time…. Just five more minutes? Three? Damn it, he needed a longer dive profile, where he’d allowed for 120 feet of depth, not 140 feet. He’d only been at the lower depth for a few minutes, setting the anchors. On the wrong side of the boat too, or he’d have seen this right away. Of course he would have….

  The computer queeped again. Stupid thing should shut the fuck up: he had a sub. Time, he needed time. Another five minutes, or ten—his air was good for longer than that. He could recalculate his decomp: ten minutes would need….

  Ten minutes would need half an hour. Lee would understand…

  No. Lee would not, and Bobby’d promised.

  His stolen thirty seconds would cost him. In time decompressing. In trust. He kicked strongly back toward the anchor line, passing two of his companions. Pausing only long enough to jab his finger at the conning tower, he pointed them at one huge clue. Kent, in red, flashed him an A-OK signal and headed off to look, followed by Stuart in neon blue fins. They still had ten minutes of bottom time. But toward the sunlight Bobby would go. Damn it.

  Nothing else to do but release some air for an ascension guide. Careful not to rise faster than his bubbles, Bobby tore himself away from the prize. He had close to an hour to hover, off-gassing his nitrogen. Why did this level of the sea have to be so damned murky? Here he was, able to do nothing for a while but hang in the water at eighty feet with the barest hint of the wreck visible. Damn. Damn, damn, and more damn! He needed to look, he had to look, but instead he checked his dive computer, ticking off the minutes until he could ascend that much closer to telling Lee what they’d found.

  After endless minutes, another queep prompted him upward to spend some dull, boring time with nothing visible except the hull of the Bottom Hunter and the sun dancing on the water’s surface. Not that he wanted to see any of the area’s toothier residents—for every bluefin he’d hauled out of the water, there was probably a shark that he hadn’t. A school of cod flashed by—not enough to disturb his solitude.

  The pages of the Jane’s Fighting Ships he’d perused so casually taunted him from the corner of his mind’s eye. He’d glanced at the columns of sub types with italicized data on lengths and details. Cross sections and tables of call numbers and eventual fates had been entertainment, nothing to memorize. Cursing his lack of prescience, Bobby wracked his brain for ways to identify what they’d found.

  Had Lee fucked up his navigation? The charts really did have a dozen sunken subs near the coast. Had they blithely discovered something known for seventy years or more? But….

  Couldn’t be. Too pristine, no great gouges in the marine life, and that shit accumulated at a known rate in coastal waters. How far out were they?

  Another queep sent Bobby up the water column, another twenty-five feet closer to Lee, references, and answers. The minutes dragged like hours while his hands and feet went chill and then as numb as his face.

  One more stop, short, thank goodness, and then he broke the surface. He bobbed in the swell, unbuckling his BC and tanks to hand over. The dive computer beeped its approval of the time he’d spent on the bottom and on the way up. Nobody, not even Lee, could bitch about him not diving the plan.

  Swatting Tip out of the way, Lee braced himself on the dive platform, clipping in to the tank plate lest a couple thousand dollars in equipment get slapped out of their hands by the water. A hundred and fifty pounds of gear that became nothing at neutral buoyancy felt like a ton at the surface, and being without his gear left him bobbing like a cork on the water. Floating and helpless, needing to hold on to something else be swept away. Boat, platform, and diver all rose and fell with the waves.

  “Wahoo!” Bobby hollered so Lee’d know right off they’d hit pay dirt. “Found something big!”

  Lee hoisted the gear and reached down to give Bobby a hand up and out of the water.

  Once on his feet, Bobby let Lee steady him while he jerked off his fins and threw them to the rear deck.

  “Oh damn, just… oh damn,” Bobby gasped. “Lee….”

  “What did we find?” Lee helped him up to the rear deck, where Bobby could only lean against the freshwater well and try to frame his discovery in words. Tip a
nd another crewman hove into earshot.

  “You won’t believe me.” Bobby shook his head. He wouldn’t believe himself, not without proof. “You have to see.”

  “Come on, try us,” Lee urged.

  “We gotta dump the camera into my iPad. Now.” Now while the rest of their charter remained below. Now while the exultation could be just for the Bottom Hunter. Bobby wouldn’t even stop to remove his dry suit and could barely take the time to dunk his equipment to remove the salt.

  “I’ll grab it.” The crewman disappeared down the hatch.

  Tip swished Bobby’s fins in the freshwater well, then reached to unhitch tanks from vest and rebreather.

  Yeah, first things first—Bobby dunked his gear, rinsing off the salt water that would corrode everything keeping him alive on the bottom. Nothing sloshed around in the GoPro housing, so he dunked his mask too. Drowning a four-hundred-dollar camera would suck, but not nearly as badly as drowning the video he’d shot.

  “Come on, Bobby, rinse your suit.” Lee aimed the hose at him. He obviously didn’t know what was down there or he wouldn’t insist on—well, yes, he would. And so would Bobby if he wasn’t about ready to piss himself. “You can use your words, you know. What’s down there?”

  “A submarine. A fucking submarine.” Bobby hauled his hood over his face, trying to escape his gear.

  “No way.” Jaws dropped right and left.

  “You’re bullshitting us,” Tip scoffed. “There’s a sub down there and you’re up here, right on time? That never happens.”

  “It happens now.” Bobby swung around to meet Lee’s eyes. His face flickered with a thousand thoughts that stopped on relief. “I dove the plan, even if we did find us a submarine. New leaf and all. Come on, take a look.” Peeled down to his fleeces and boots, he pelted into the lounge, fumbling the camera out of the housing. Why did they have to make mini-USB ports so small? His hands were so cold he needed three jabs to mate the camera and cable while Lee mercifully assembled the tablet end.

  Poking the camera into digital action and then prodding the screen until it blossomed into the proof of his words, Bobby didn’t shove any of his eager audience away. Lee breathed over one shoulder, Tip the other, and their crewman had to crane to see best he could.

  “Look, here’s the hull.” The picture panned, matching Bobby’s underwater peering from side to side. “It wasn’t obvious at first, but something’s stove in here.” His skeptical audience oohed and aahed over their peek into the damage. “And here—this can’t be anything else but the conning tower. And here’s the railing; here’s the snorkel.” He traced details. “I didn’t go down to check the periscope. I was trying to conserve bottom time, and by the time I found this, I didn’t have a lot of minutes left.”

  “No excursions to 140 or 150 feet?” Lee sounded stern.

  Bobby’d already sworn to sticking with the plan. And still Lee had to ask that. Because the Bobby he knew would have taken a closer look. “Only to set the anchors. You can check my dive computer for the depth profile. Not going to look damn near killed this curious cat.” Every time Lee asked Bobby to taste his drink, he must have felt like this. Untrusted. For good reasons. “You’ll see, I stayed at 120 feet. Gotta go down the north anchor line, and plan on 140, 150 feet. And about half the bottom time, damn it.”

  “But everyone goes armed with cameras.” Lee rested a hand on Bobby’s shoulder, peering hard. “Any idea what we’ve got here?”

  “Older—prefifties—because it’s so even and flat on one side, not a teardrop. But late thirties at the earliest, see? It has a snorkel. More than that, can’t tell yet.” Bobby turned to his captain. “Gotta find details, see what we have, because until we narrow it down a little more, penetrating it’s going to be triple hazardous. If we know, penetrating is just dangerous.”

  Fuck, Lee was close enough to kiss. That hand…. Didn’t matter that Tip was leaning on his other side just as hard; that was need to know and nothing more. But Lee, with his lips near Bobby’s temple and his hand, his hot hand, and a triumph.

  “Hey!” came from the back of the boat. “A little help here?” A shrill screech split the air—someone was impatient enough to use his emergency whistle.

  Lee followed his duty, leaving with the hint of a one-handed squeeze.

  Alone, Bobby reset the video by ten minutes, staring at the evidence until his eyes blurred. Damn it, just damn it all. Most amazing thing they’d ever found, and they couldn’t celebrate with a kiss.

  Well, why the hell not?

  RINSED AND fed with the big pot of stew Tip put up in the galley (meaning reheated the ambrosia his wife had cooked up before they left), Bobby switched the cable from his iPad to the TV that loomed over the lounge. Secure enough to stay on the wall even in high seas, the big screen usually played bargain-bin DVD movies on chartered evenings. Now every last one of the divers jostled for the best view.

  “I thought I saw a rise here,” Stuart pointed, following Bobby’s line of sight. “But it’s all stove in.”

  “External damage, then,” commented Darrell.

  “Thanks, Captain Obvious,” snarked Kent. “We’re talking wartime vintage boat. Everyone was trying to cause external damage.”

  “That’s not the only way a sub goes down, asshat.” Darrell’s voice was milder than his words. “A lot of them were scuttled by the crews. They’d surrender, but they wouldn’t yield the boat. Not when it was likely to get a new name and be put into service against them.”

  “So what—they’d blow the torpedoes inside?”

  “The fastest way to flood a boat is to put a big hole in the hull. U-260 was scuttled. Now it’s a popular site.” Lee turned the video back to the beginning. “None of you ever dove it?”

  None of the charter divers had, but the corner of Bobby’s mouth turned up. Like he remembered that trip fondly, and maybe not just for the diving. They’d been guests on someone else’s boat for that trip and never again, because sleeping in the bunkroom on separate mattresses wasn’t the way they rocked a night on the water. Then. Lee had gone below to see the wreck for himself.

  “We did. The damage blew outward. The interior was a mess, and this one won’t be any better. Plus—” Lee’s mouth went dry. “—this boat probably went down in action, and there’s no record of it, so nobody knew about it then. If they’d picked up the men, there’d be a record. So….”

  “So there’s bodies. Or could be.” Stuart nearly choked. “I went into dentistry so as not to do dead bodies.”

  “Yeah.” Bobby froze the video on the conning tower. “You don’t have to go in. But we don’t know for sure what’s in there, or who.”

  “They might have gotten out on the rafts, maybe?” Chuck wondered. “Even though there’s no record? Maybe of someone getting ashore under mysterious circumstances? Weren’t there groups of spies caught on the coast?”

  “I wouldn’t bank on it, guys.” Lee rubbed his face. “I didn’t have any idea what I was bringing you to when we got here, but I think we have to assume we have a sub sunk in battle.”

  “Less than a hundred miles off the coast of Delaware?” Chuck’s jaw dropped. “Didn’t they keep decent records during the Battle of the Atlantic? This is the north end of Torpedo Alley. You’d think they’d have kept track.”

  “You’d think,” Lee grumbled, “But the records for the U-869 were a clusterfuck of unbelievable proportions. Orders to take them to the Mediterranean didn’t transmit, and nobody knew for sure she’d been sunk. Half the battle records were somebody’s wishes and guesses, so who knows what else got fucked up.”

  “Yeah, without a debris field, how would you know you’d scored?” mused Eddy, barely out of his teens but with a dive record into his second logbook and a regrettable tendency to spend off-hours playing Grand Theft Auto.

  “Hey, butthead,” Bobby snarled before Lee could speak. “This isn’t a score. This isn’t a game. We found a submarine, probably a U-boat, from World War Two. Men fought an
d died in a fucking tin can, and we just found it. This is a war grave—do you have any idea at all what that means?”

  Almost as one, the divers stiffened and turned furious gazes on the idiot in their midst.

  “Uh….” Eddy lost some bravado under the combined wrath of the group. “Bodies?”

  “Yeah, bodies.” Lee jumped in before Bobby could tear strips of hide off the kid. “Or what’s left of them. Doesn’t matter which side they were on—these were guys mostly not any older than you who thought they were doing the right thing for their country. Even knowing that going out on patrol meant they probably wouldn’t come back.” Maybe whatever Bobby would have said would have been less barbed than what Lee spat out. “They fought, they died. We honor them.”

  Eddy made a face. “Germans?”

  “Humans! You stupid fuck, they are humans!” Bobby roared.

  Throwing Eddy overboard for stupidity would violate the “honor humans” rule, and nothing else was stopping Lee from catapulting the little shit out into the water. “That’s right. Humans. We honor them. We don’t disturb remains. We don’t take wanton souvenirs. Anyone who does will wish to hell the German government got a hold of them instead of me because that’s contraband, and it doesn’t come aboard my boat.” And neither does the guy who brought it to the surface hung in the air. Lee wouldn’t actually leave that kind of vandal bobbing in the ocean sixty miles from land. Maybe.

  “So—” Eddy cringed small in his chair. “—we can’t bring anything up?”

  “If it isn’t directly related to identifying this boat, no.” Lee swung his stink eye around the group, including Bobby. “Bits of equipment that might have the boat’s info, yeah. Anything just for souvenirs or, God forbid, human, hell to the no.”

  “Don’t have to tell me twice,” muttered Stuart. “Hell, didn’t have to tell me once. I’m not going in period.”