Shadow Divers

by Robert Kurson

  As Nagle helped Chatterton undress, the other divers began their exploration of the wreck 230 feet below. The current had eased since Chatterton had departed, allowing those so inclined to swim along the hull without fear of exhaustion.

  Ostrowski and Roberts studied the outline of the wreck and the flatness of its topside decking. Both pegged it for a submarine. The duo swam slowly along the top of the wreck, careful not to overbreathe in their excitement, never knowing whether they moved forward or aft. They soon reached a hole in the top of the steel hull that looked to have been blown violently inward; steel didn’t bend like that willingly. They stuck their heads inside, and their lights brought to life a zoo of broken pipes, machinery, valves, and switches. They craned their necks upward and lit nests of electric cables dangling from the ceiling. Their breath quickened. This room could contain history; a quick swim in and a quick swim out and they might find the wreck’s identity. Neither dared enter. This room might contain answers, but it also held a hundred ways to kill the overeager diver.

  Shoe and Cochran took in the wreck’s cigar shape and considered its level of deterioration. Each had experience diving World War II ships, and this wreck looked to them to be worn in just the same ways. The team spent most of its dive working to loosen a valve that interested Cochran, but the part would not budge.

  Hildemann, diving alone, had a tougher time believing that the mass he stood on was a submarine. That changed as he arrived near the bow of the wreck about 10 feet off the sand, where he saw a long, narrow tube reaching into the boat. He had read books on submarines before. This was a torpedo tube—the weapon’s passageway into the ocean.

  Skibinski and Feldman ventured forty feet from the wreck to obtain a wider view, a bold decision at this depth and visibility. They looked at each other and nodded: a submarine. They swam back toward the strobe they had clipped to the anchor line. Both men had dived the Texas Tower, one of the darkest of the Northeast’s deep wrecks. This wreck was darker. They stayed close to the strobe.

  McMahon and Yurga remained atop the wreck. They, too, knew that this streamlined form belonged to a submarine. As they drifted higher, Yurga spotted flooding vents along the hull, the centerpiece of a submarine’s diving system. A minute later, Yurga beheld the angled hatch that Chatterton had seen. He, too, pushed his head and light inside. He, too, saw the tail fins and propeller of the most notorious sea weapon ever built. The men yearned to see more, but each had agreed topside that at this depth, their first priority would be to stay near the anchor line and therefore stay alive. Yurga grabbed a lobster and joined McMahon on the ascent back to the dive boat.

  Brennan, the first to arrive after Chatterton, inched forward in the current until he came to what he recognized was the bow of the sub. He allowed himself to drift farther forward until he was twenty feet in front of the wreck, then turned around to face the bow. He bled a wisp of air from his wings and sank gently to the sand, landing on his knees. He knelt there as a worshiper, reverent before this grand, unmistakable mass. The current began to howl, but Brennan stayed rooted in the sand, transfixed.

  “I can’t believe this,” he thought. “I know this is a U-boat. I know this thing is German. Look at it! It’s coming right at me, like in the opening scene in Das Boot. I can hear the music from the movie.”

  From behind his wonder and narcosis, an inner voice managed to remind Brennan about the current. He swam back, fighting the water every kick of the way until he reached the anchor line, deeply narced, winded, and light-headed. “I’ll never let go of that wreck again,” he promised himself. Then he began his ascent back to the Seeker.

  Between 1939 and 1945, Germany assembled a force of 1,167 U-boats. Each one, for its ability to stalk enemies invisibly, became the most perfect and terrible reflection of man’s first fear—that death lurks silently and everywhere, always. Some U-boats crept with impunity to within a few miles of American shores, close enough to tune in jazz radio stations and watch automobile headlights through their periscopes. In one month in 1940, U-boats sank 66 ships while losing only one of their own. Bodies of men killed aboard ships sunk by U-boats washed up on American shores during World War II. The sight was gruesome. The implication—that the killers could be anywhere but could not be seen or heard—was magnitudes worse.

  Of those 1,167 U-boats, 757 were either sunk, captured, bombed in home ports or foreign bases, or fell from accident or collision. Of the 859 U-boats that left base for frontline patrol, 648 were sunk or captured while operating at sea, a loss rate of more than 75 percent. Some were sunk by enemy vessels and aircraft that could not confirm the kills, others by mines, still others by mechanical or human failure. Because most U-boats died beneath the water’s surface, as many as 65 disappeared without explanation. In worlds of unsearchable water, U-boats made the perfect unfindable graves.

  This day, as the divers began to surface and board the Seeker, they rushed out of their gear and into debate. Each of them was giddy to have discovered a virgin submarine. Each of them already had a theory. It could be U-550, a U-boat supposedly sunk in the far North Atlantic but never recovered. It could not be the American S-5; numerous divers had searched for and researched that sub for years and were certain it lay near Maryland. The crew could have escaped—a hatch looked to be open, though it was hard to tell. Something violent might have happened to the submarine—no one had seen the conning tower, the distinctively shaped observation post and entryway atop submarines that houses the periscopes and serves as the commander’s battle station. A refrain began to build: Where the hell was the conning tower?

  Then, Yurga. He had stopped, by chance, at a naval bookstore the day before to pick up some light reading for the trip. His choice: The U-boat: The Evolution and Technical History of German Submarines. When he produced the book after surfacing, the divers crowded over his shoulder to compare their memories to the book’s detailed schematic diagrams. Chatterton recognized the cylindrical bottles he had seen on the wreck. Yurga saw the flooding vents. This thing had to be German. This thing had to be a U-boat.

  As the divers continued their discussion and book study, Chatterton and Nagle drifted from the group and climbed into the wheelhouse. The crew pulled the anchor. Nagle set a course back for Brielle, fired the diesels, and pulled away from the site. Then he and Chatterton began a private discussion.

  This was a historic dive, they agreed, but discovery was only half the job. The other half, the everything half, lay in identification. Both men scoffed at divers who guessed at the identity of wrecks they had found, who didn’t understand the slovenliness of saying, “Well, we found a piece of china with a Danish stamp, therefore the wreck is Danish.” Were Nagle and Chatterton simply to announce that they had found a submarine, what would that really tell anyone? But to announce with certainty the identity of the submarine you discovered, to give the nameless a name—that is when a man writes history.

  To Nagle, there were also more worldly reasons for making the identification. Even in his broken-down physical state, the captain retained his appetite for glory. Identifying this submarine would guarantee his legacy as a dive legend and extend his reputation to the outside world, a place that didn’t know from the USS San Diego or even the Andrea Doria but always paid attention to the word U-boat. A find like this would make him famous. A positive identification would mean customers. In those rare instances when a dive charter captain discovered a shipwreck, he came to own that wreck in the minds of divers; they wanted to travel with the guy who’d found the missing, to attach themselves to history through the man who had looked inside it.

  Nagle and Chatterton believed it would take just another dive or two to pull a positive piece of identification from the wreck: a tag, a builder’s plaque, a diary, something. Until then, there was sound reason not to utter a word of the discovery to anyone. A virgin sub—especially if it were a U-boat—would attract the attention of rival divers everywhere. Some might attempt to shadow the Seeker on its next trip in order
to pick off the location. Others might guess at the general vicinity of the location, then try to sneak up on the Seeker while she was anchored with divers in the water, unable to cut away and run. Once a rival had the numbers, he could rush in and steal the Seeker’s credit and glory; there would be no shortage of pirates looking to make their bones on such a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. But in the minds of Chatterton and Nagle, the gravest threat came from a single source, and neither man had to invoke the name to know against whom they had to guard this wreck with their lives.

  Bielenda.

  In 1991, the eastern seaboard featured only a handful of big-name dive charter boats. The Seeker was one of them. Another was the Long Island–based Wahoo, a fifty-five-foot fiberglass hull captained by fifty-five-year-old Steve Bielenda, a barrel-chested, cherubic-faced man who looked to be accordioned under his two-hundred-fifteen-pound frame. A 1980 Newsday feature had dubbed Bielenda “King of the Deep,” and he seemed unwilling to allow a day to pass without reminding those who would listen—and especially those who would not—of the coronation.

  From the moment Nagle entered the charter business, in the mid-1980s, he and Bielenda despised each other. No one, including the captains themselves, seemed certain how the hard feelings started, but for years they lobbed accusations at each other, verbal grenades filled with reputation-piercing shrapnel: Nagle was a drunk has-been who endangered his divers and berated customers; Bielenda was a do-nothing blowhard who was just following the money, going with the established wrecks, doing nothing new. Customers often found themselves forced to choose sides; a diver became either Stevie’s boy or Billy’s boy, and pity the soul who confessed to diving with both. “You’re diving the Wahoo next week?” an incredulous Nagle would ask customers. “What kind of fucking guy are you? He’ll break your balls and steal your money. You’re cattle to him.” It was equally unpretty on the Wahoo, where the crew would join Bielenda in a dressing-down of anyone foolish enough to admit enjoying the Seeker. “Hose this guy off,” Wahoo crewmen were heard to say loudly of paying customers. “He stinks like the Seeker.” After one Wahoo customer admitted to a fondness for Nagle, he found the hardcover book he had brought along at the bottom of the boat’s bilge. By 1991, the Bielenda-Nagle feud had become notorious.

  To Nagle’s supporters, the foundation of Bielenda’s bitterness was basic: Nagle was a threat to Bielenda’s title. Nagle drank too much, sure, but he remained an explorer, an original thinker, a researcher, a dreamer, a man of daring. And he was, as his growing customer base noted, a bit of a diving legend. To many, Bielenda seemed to do little of what made Nagle great, little of the pioneering that should have been protein to a true king of the deep. Next to Nagle, Bielenda appeared to play it safe, a guy who would always sit out bad weather at the dock while Nagle challenged angry seas. As Nagle’s reputation for exploration grew, customers drifted to his boat. Bielenda’s business could easily withstand the migration; what he seemed unable to tolerate was the affront to his throne.

  It wasn’t Bielenda’s words, however, that worried Nagle as the Seeker bobbed above this mystery submarine. It was his certainty that Bielenda would stop at nothing to claim-jump the wreck. He had heard stories about Bielenda—that if you crewed for him on the Wahoo, you might be expected to give him a choice of whatever artifacts you recovered; that he half-jokingly told customers that should they ever recover the Oregon’s bell while diving from the Wahoo, they had better be prepared to gift it to the King of the Deep or swim the thirteen miles back to shore with the artifact; that Bielenda had friends, and they seemed to be everywhere—in the Coast Guard, on other charters, on fishing boats, in the Eastern Dive Boat Association, of which he was president. Nagle was convinced that if word leaked of the U-boat discovery, Bielenda would head straight for it and his goals would be threefold and deadly: identify the wreck; raid the artifacts; take the credit.

  Chatterton figured that even if the Wahoo didn’t jump the wreck, other divers looking to make their bones would try. Secrecy, therefore, would have to be paramount.

  “The Seeker is booked for the next two weeks,” Nagle told Chatterton. “Let’s come back on the twenty-first, a Saturday. We invite only the guys on this trip, no one else, not a goddamn other person, because these guys took a shot and that’ll be their reward. We make a pact. Nobody on the boat breathes a word to anyone. This is our submarine.”

  “I’m with you,” Chatterton said.

  Chatterton left Nagle to steer in the wheelhouse and walked down the steep white stairs to the rear deck. He called the divers together and asked them to step into the salon for a meeting. One by one, the divers gathered on bunks, on the floor, by the toaster, under the Playboy centerfolds, their hair still slicked with salt water, a few clutching pretzels or Cokes. Chatterton addressed the group in his booming, Long Island–tinged baritone.

  “This is a huge dive,” he said. “But finding it isn’t enough. We need to identify it. We identify it and we rewrite history.

  “Bill and I have made a decision. We’re coming back to the wreck on September twenty-first. It’s a private trip—only you guys are invited. No one else comes. There are a lot of great divers out there, guys who are legends, who would kill to come with us. They aren’t coming. If you decide not to attend, your bunk stays empty.

  “But we gotta keep this thing secret. Word gets out that we found a submarine and we’ll have two hundred guys crawling all over our asses out here.”

  Chatterton paused for a moment. No one made a sound. He asked the men to swear an oath of secrecy. Every diver on the boat, he said, had to swear silence about what they had found this day. If others asked what the men had done today, they were to say they dove the Parker. He told them to eliminate the word submarine from their vocabularies. He told them to say nothing to anyone until they identified the wreck.

  “This must be unanimous,” Chatterton said. “Every one of you guys needs to agree. If even a single guy in this room isn’t comfortable keeping this secret, that’s cool, that’s fine, but then the next trip becomes catch-as-catch-can, an open boat, anyone welcome. So I gotta ask you now: Is everyone in?”

  Deep-wreck charters are not communal events. The divers’ presence together on the boat is a matter of transportation, not teamwork; each devises his own plan, seeks his own artifacts, makes his own discoveries. Deep-wreck divers, however friendly, learn to think of themselves as self-contained entities. In dangerous waters, such a mind-set enables them to survive. Now Chatterton was proposing that fourteen men become a single, silent organism. Agreements like this simply did not occur on dive charters.

  For a moment there was silence. Some of these men had only just met on this trip.

  Then, one by one, the divers went around the room and spoke.

  “I’m in.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I’m not saying shit.”

  “Count me in.”

  “My mouth is shut.”

  In a minute it was done. Every man had agreed. This was their submarine. This was their submarine alone.

  The Seeker glided back toward Brielle on a cushion of hope and possibility. Divers passed around Yurga’s U-boat book and tried to contain themselves, fashioning responsible rejoinders like “We know this will take time to research and will likely be complex, but with solid work we should be optimistic about identification.” Inside, they were jumping on trampolines and dancing in sandboxes. As evening fell, they allowed themselves to invent scenarios to explain their submarine, and in the heady triumph of the journey home, all theories were credible, every idea a possibility: Could Hitler be aboard this sub? Isn’t there some rumor he tried to escape Germany at the end of the war? Maybe the wreck is filled with Nazi gold. Six hours later, at about nine P.M., Nagle eased the boat back into its slip and the divers gathered their gear.

  One diver, Steve Feldman, stayed back, waiting for Chatterton to emerge from the wheelhouse. Of the fourteen men aboard this boat, Feldman was the newest to the sport, with
about ten years of experience. He had discovered diving later in life, at thirty-four, after a painful divorce. So hopelessly had he fallen in love with scuba that he had virtually willed himself to become an instructor, and of late had been teaching diving classes in Manhattan. Many of the divers on board, including Chatterton, had never seen Feldman before this trip; he dove most often in warm-water resort locations or for lobsters on Captain Paul Hepler’s famous Wednesday bug runs off Long Island. As Chatterton made his way down to the back deck, Feldman stopped him.

  “John, I want to thank you,” he said. “This trip has been so cool. And it’s important, it’s really important. I can’t wait until we go back. I mean, I’m really excited to be returning, and I just want to thank you and Bill for including me on something like this. This is like a dream come true.”

  “It is for me, too, pal,” Chatterton said. “This is the thing you dream about.”

  The Seeker’s secret lasted nearly two full hours. Around midnight, Kevin Brennan dialed his close friend Richie Kohler, a fellow Brooklynite.

  At twenty-nine, Kohler was already one of the eastern seaboard’s most accomplished and daring deep-wreck divers. He was also a passionate amateur historian with a keen interest in all things German. To Brennan, it would have been disloyal to keep such exciting news from his friend. Kohler, in fact, would have been invited on the Seeker trip but for a history of bad blood with Chatterton. Kohler had been one of “Stevie’s boys,” and though he had since had an angry falling-out with Bielenda, his history with Chatterton and Bielenda virtually guaranteed that he would not have been welcome on this trip.

  The phone rang in Kohler’s bedroom.

  “Richie, man, Richie, wake up. It’s Kevin.”

  “What time is it . . .?”