Shadow Divers

by Robert Kurson

“Listen, man, wake up. We found something really good.”

  “What’d you find? What time is it?”

  “That’s the thing, Richie—I can’t tell you what we found.”

  Kohler’s wife rolled over and glared. He took the phone into the kitchen.

  “Kevin, cut the shit. Just tell me what you found.”

  “No, man. I took an oath. I promised not to tell. You can’t make me tell.”

  “Look, Kevin. You can’t call here at midnight, tell me you found something great, then expect me to go back to sleep. Let’s have it.”

  “I can’t, man. Richie, come on, don’t bust my balls. I’ll tell you what: take a guess. If you guess right, I won’t say no.”

  So Kohler, in his underwear and still bleary-eyed, plopped down at the kitchen table and guessed. Is it a passenger liner? No. A barge? No. The Cayru? The Carolina? The Texel? Nope, nope, nope. The guessing ballet continued for another five minutes; always Brennan’s answer was no. Kohler rose and paced the room. His face turned red.

  “Kevin, give me a hint, you bastard! You’re breaking my shoes here.”

  Brennan thought it over. Then, in a thick, almost cartoonish Italian accent, he said, “It’s-a-not-a-MY boat, it’s-a . . .”

  “What?” Kohler asked.

  “That’s your hint,” Brennan said. Take it or leave it. “It’s-a-not-a-MY boat, it’s-a . . .”

  “Have you been drinking, Kevin?”

  “That’s your hint, Richie.”

  For five minutes, Brennan repeated the clue. For five minutes, Kohler paced and cursed his friend, conjuring expletives and variations of expletives only another Brooklynite could reassemble. Then it came to him: It’s-a-not-a-MY boat, it’s-a-YOU boat. A U-boat.

  “You found a U-boat?”

  “Shit, yes, Richie, we did.”

  Kohler sat down. A U-boat? There were no U-boats in New Jersey waters.

  “It’s gotta be the Spikefish,” Kohler finally exclaimed, referring to the World War II American submarine sunk in the 1960s for target practice. “If anything, you found the Spikefish.”

  “No, Richie! I was kneeling in the sand in front of it, I was looking up, and I could hear the music from Das Boot—da-da-DA-da! You can’t tell anyone. This is top, top secret.”

  “I’m calling Bill Nagle right now,” Kohler said. “I gotta be on the next trip.”

  “No! No! Don’t do that, Richie! You can’t say anything.”

  Kohler finally agreed to keep the secret. Like Brennan, he went to sleep that night rerunning scenes from Das Boot.

  The same evening, Nagle hit the bottle in celebration of the discovery. With each sip, the notion of keeping such a secret seemed selfish, even criminal. Ice clinking in his glass, he called Danny Crowell, a mate on the Seeker who, because of a business obligation, had been unable to make the trip. He didn’t bother with clues. “We found a U-boat,” he slurred. “Don’t tell a fucking soul.”

  The next morning, as John Yurga punched in at the dive shop where he worked, he received a call from Joe “Captain Zero” Terzuoli, a friendly dive boat captain. Terzuoli was the store’s best customer.

  “Yurga, hey, it’s Zero. How was your trip?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t too bad. It was a rock pile, so we moved on and dove the Parker.”

  “Oh, well, you took your shot,” Zero said. “Catch you soon, buddy.”

  Five minutes later, the phone rang again. Yurga answered.

  “This is Zero! I just talked to Ralphie, who talked to Danny Crowell, who says Bill Nagle told him it was a U-boat!”

  Yurga’s stomach pounded. He liked Zero. It sickened him to lie. But he had sworn an oath.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Zero. It was rocks, man. Call Bill.”

  Yurga hung up and raced to dial Nagle before Zero could do it.

  “Bill, this is Yurga. What the hell is going on? Did you open your mouth?”

  “That fucking Danny Crowell!” Nagle exploded. “I told him not to tell!”

  The remaining divers seemed better able to keep the secret. A few told family or nondiver friends, while others were unwilling to risk it even with wives. Soon, word of Nagle’s indiscretion reached Chatterton. He knew his friend’s weakness and was not surprised. He suggested that Nagle make several outlandish claims—to say on Monday that he had discovered a U-boat, on Tuesday that he had found the Corvallis, on Wednesday the Carolina, and so on, until no one believed any bit of it. Nagle mumbled that he would try. Chatterton heard the ice clink. The men would need to stand guard with that much more vigilance to prevent getting jumped on the wreck the next time out.

  Two weeks was an agonizing wait for divers so alive with mystery. Landlocked for eternity, many did the next best thing to diving—they hit the books.

  Most worked independently from their homes or local libraries. They consulted area shipwreck chronicles, U-boat histories, and World War II naval records. Their strategy: find any submarines recorded sunk anywhere near where the mystery wreck lay. Two U-boats leaped from the pages.

  In April 1944, Allied forces sank U-550 at a location of 40°09¢N latitude and 69°44¢W longitude. Those numbers sounded distinctly New Jersey to the divers. They rushed to their navigational charts and traced their fingers along the lats and longs until they reached a point about a hundred miles north of the mystery wreck’s general location, still in New Jersey waters but not a great match. Still, no one had ever found U-550. To most of the divers, the hundred-mile discrepancy might be explainable; perhaps U-550’s sinking location was recorded imprecisely; perhaps U-550 had only been wounded by Allied forces and then limped underwater to the mystery wreck site before sinking. Perhaps anything—U-550 was the only submarine recorded sunk in New Jersey waters. She became the divers’ odds-on favorite.

  Close behind was U-521, which had been sunk in June 1943 at a position of approximately 37°43¢N latitude and 73°16¢W longitude. Again, the divers consulted their navigational charts. This location lay in Virginia waters, about ninety miles east of Chincoteague Bay. Though not in New Jersey waters, the site was just 120 miles south of the mystery wreck. As with U-550, the divers considered such a discrepancy to be explainable. As with U-550, the U-521 remained undiscovered.

  Divers called each other breathlessly to announce their findings: it is either U-550 or U-521—no doubt about it.

  Yurga sent a letter to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. He made this request: “I’d like all the information you have on U-boats, please,” then gave his name and address.

  A week later, Yurga received a letter from an archivist.

  “Mr. Yurga, we have forty-three linear feet of floor-to-ceiling shelves of U-boat documents. This does not include drawings, just text. Perhaps you might be interested in visiting here to do your research.”

  For his part, Nagle had done a bit of research into U-550 and U-521. He trembled with excitement as he digested these stories and processed their implications. Both U-boats had been reported sunk relatively close to the mystery wreck site. Neither U-boat had ever been found. To Nagle, this was proof that the submarine they had discovered was either U-550 or U-521. He phoned Chatterton and asked him to drop by the Seeker after work.

  Around dusk, Chatterton pulled into the Horrible Inn’s parking lot. Nagle was on the Seeker’s back deck, standing watch over the pile of research papers he had accumulated.

  “John, come on board, you gotta see this,” Nagle called to him. “Are you ready for some stories?”

  For the next hour, Nagle walked Chatterton through the sinkings of U-550 and U-521. With each detail, Chatterton became more convinced that neither U-boat was the mystery sub. When Nagle finished, Chatterton shook his head.

  “Bill, no way.”

  “What do you mean, no way?”

  “It’s not either of those U-boats.”

  “The hell you mean? Why not?”

  “Bill, look at the reported sinking location for U-550. It’s a hundred miles f
rom our location. That is a huge distance—”

  “The Allies must have gotten the location wrong,” Nagle interrupted. “It was the heat of battle. Someone made a mistake. A slip of the pen—”

  “Didn’t happen, Bill. You’ve got three destroyers there. They agree on the location—look at these attack reports. Are you telling me that three separate warships made three separate but identical mistakes? Are you telling me these destroyers knew how to find Northern Ireland but couldn’t accurately record their location in American waters?”

  Nagle breathed hard for a minute but said nothing. Chatterton shrugged his shoulders in apology. Nagle’s eyes grew angry.

  “Well, then our wreck must be U-521,” Nagle said. “If it’s not the 550, it’s the goddamned 521.”

  “It’s not the 521 either,” Chatterton said. “Again, we’re talking about a United States Navy ship relatively close to the coast. Are we supposed to believe that the navy can’t tell if they’re off Baltimore or Brielle? The navy can’t tell where they are? How can you be sixty miles offshore and not know where you are?”

  The veins in Nagle’s forehead popped out.

  “Okay, wiseass! Which U-boat is it then?”

  “I don’t know, Bill. But I’m pretty damn sure it’s neither one of those.”

  A few days later, Chatterton decided to take a trip. Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry was the permanent home of U-505, a type IXC U-boat captured by the Allies off Africa in 1944. The submarine had been kept in pristine condition and was open to the public.

  “I want to walk through the submarine and feel it,” Chatterton told his wife, Kathy. “I know nothing about U-boats. But I want to go inside, stand in it, and absorb things.”

  The airlines demanded a fortune to fly midweek with no notice. Chatterton paid it. He would take a day off from work, stay in Chicago for several hours, then fly home the same night.

  Chatterton arrived at O’Hare airport on Wednesday, September 18. Only three days remained until the Seeker’s return to the wreck site. He took a taxi to the gargantuan museum and followed signs inside to the U-boat. He stood in line alongside restless schoolchildren on field trips, vaguely interested retirees, and a few military buffs. Then he calculated how many times he might repeat this tour before his return flight to New Jersey.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JOHN CHATTERTON

  IN WAYS, it amazed Chatterton that he was still alive to visit museums. He had lived a life of startling decisions, many of which he’d known could kill him, and all of which would have been unfathomable to the tourists with whom he stood in line. Now that he was forty years old, married, and ideally employed, his past sometimes seemed to belong to someone else. Still, in unexpected places like this museum, small things hurtled him back in time. Drab gray paint on a waiting area display evoked 1970, a year that still lived hot in his bloodstream. Photos of a giant ocean hung on nearby walls tossed him onto the waters of an unlikely boyhood. Today, he might have looked like everyone else standing beside him. But none of them had come close to a life like his.

  That life began on a leafy September in 1951, when Jack and Patricia Chatterton welcomed their first child into their lives. The scene was 1950s perfect: Jack was a Yale-educated, up-and-coming aerospace engineer for the Sperry company, a fantastical-sounding job in an era when the word aerospace conjured images of Martians and death rays. Patricia was a twenty-four-year-old, newly retired fashion model who had twirled her willowy shape and waterfall of brown hair on international runways.

  When John was three, his family moved to a new ranch-style home in Garden City, a tony Long Island suburb populated by Manhattan executives, local business owners, and jockey Eddie Arcaro. Few could imagine a better place to raise a child. Garden City was safe and quiet, its tract homes and color televisions promising Americans a new and better way of living.

  When John was four, Patricia gave birth to another son, MacRae, named for Patricia’s father. As the boys grew into school age, Garden City’s fortunes grew with them. Four Long Island Railroad stations served the town in a time when most communities were lucky to get one. The Chattertons enjoyed a large TV and electric heat. John’s bicycle had training wheels that didn’t squeak.

  Patricia made the beach her priority. She drove her two boys forty minutes to Gilgo Beach, along a stretch of barrier islands off the South Shore of Long Island. There, she turned John and MacRae loose to run like untied balloons, their bare feet on fire against the blazing sand until they had to rush into the Atlantic for relief. John’s father never joined the family there. He was busy. He didn’t like sand and salt water.

  It was the salt water that gave John his feeling. At home, he was thrilled by little. School was okay. Books were so-so. Mickey Mantle was all right. But when he stood in the Atlantic up to his knees and looked out over the horizon, he felt as if he could see a different world, a world that no one talked about. At home, he would push his T-shirts against his face and smell the salt water, and that also gave John his feeling.

  At home, John’s life was different from those of his friends. His mother spoke to him without filters, expressing viewpoints without dumbing down her ideas or dialogue. John’s father liked to have fun, but not the ball-tossing, fishing-trip recreation that television fathers favored. Jack would spend hours behind his desk at home, studying aerospace equations and smoking through his daily four packs of Kents. Two martinis, and he was ready to put on a gorilla mask and run around the neighborhood.

  When Jack began to drink heavily, Patricia tried to coax him into becoming a proper father. He countered by upping his working, smoking, and drinking. Patricia decided then that as long as her own father was still alive, she was going to leave Jack out of things.

  Patricia’s father was Rae Emmet Arison, a retired rear admiral and navy hero who had commanded submarines for ten years in the 1930s and led battleships in World War II. To Patricia, who had idolized her father since girlhood, there was no better model of courage, decency, and immersion in life than Admiral Arison. He had since moved to South Carolina—near the beach. She arranged visits and began a campaign to steep her boys in her father’s example.

  She told her sons of her father’s love of submarines, about how each man depended on every other for his life, so that the greenest enlisted man had been as responsible for the survival of the submarine as had her father, and she told them that her father found honor in this idea. Occasionally, she told stories of Admiral Arison’s battles in the Pacific during World War II. But mostly she told the boys about how her father had distinguished himself as a man. She told them that after the war, her father had hobbled on crutches across America to visit the families of every man who had perished under his command because it was the right thing to do, that he needed to tell them in person that he appreciated their sons. She also told them that her father had helped the families of enlisted men with money and encouragement. She told them, sometimes daily, that her father valued excellence and persistence above all, and that life could be unlimited for a man who aimed high and never gave up.

  In third grade, John played the Brave Prince in a school play. He wasn’t the star; that was Prince Charming. He didn’t get the girl; that was also for Prince Charming. He got killed in the final act. But he loved the role. As opening night approached, he found himself thinking, “I really am like the Brave Prince. I’m not handsome like Prince Charming. Girls don’t really like me. But if I have one special thing, it’s courage. Being the Brave Prince is better than being Prince Charming because I get to have courage.”

  As John turned ten, his parents argued constantly. He played harder at the beach and developed a dry sense of humor and a deep belly laugh that stopped even adults. “Your kid is like one of us,” friends told Patricia. That summer, some neighbors allowed John to try their simple scuba setup. The tank was buoyant, so the boy could only float. But his head was in the water and he was breathing—breathing inside water!—and he could see rays of sunlight
beaming through the water and pointing to the bottom, and he wanted desperately to go down because he couldn’t see far enough. But the neighbors had said no diving, so he thought very hard while he breathed inside water. He thought, “If I could get down there, that is where it’s happening.”

  One summer day when John was twelve, he and his friend Rob Denigris hitchhiked a ride out of Garden City, an adventure still considered safe in 1963 America. They got fifty miles from home, to a rural outpost in Suffolk County. John and Rob began walking down a country road, looking for whatever neat stuff was supposed to be on country roads. They came upon an old Victorian-style house. The place appeared abandoned: the grounds were overgrown in weeds, loping tree branches veiled shuttered windows, and the inside looked dark and still, as if sunlight had stopped bothering. The boys approached slowly. They had seen enough horror films to know better, yet each believed there to be stories inside. They tried a door. It opened.

  Upstairs, they found piles of decades-old newspapers, still unfolded, and they sat on splintery crates and read the stories aloud to each other, tales of strange people from another time who had concerns that didn’t entirely make sense today. In the basement, John discovered jars of preserved fruit—it had to be a few years’ supply—and he was struck by the optimism of these jars, that the people who’d lived here had hoped to be around for a long time, that they had expected to enjoy eating something sweet in the future. The boys passed hours in the house. Neither considered hurting the place or disturbing its belongings. As dusk fell, they replaced their discoveries, even the newspapers, in the way they had found them.

  As the boys hitchhiked home, they constructed scenarios to explain the house and its tenants: the preserves indicated the presence of a woman; the windows had not been boarded up because the tenants had left unexpectedly; the newspapers might have been left by a relative years after the last people lived there. Time disappeared while they made these theories.

  They tried to hitchhike back to the house a few days later, but could not explain to the person who picked them up exactly where they had been. The boys walked a country road but came up empty. They tried again the next day and the next. Each time, they failed to find the house.