Shadow Divers

by Robert Kurson

  Chatterton, already aboard and joking with another diver, went silent. Without looking up, he knew that this was the sound of East Coast gang diving, the noise of the artifact pirate, the voice of the guy who had tried to screw him on the Doria. He turned away from his conversation and took a step toward the dock where Kohler stood. A half dozen conversations around the boat faded to hush. Nagle, who lived for a good blood feud, pressed his face against the glass of the wheelhouse above. Kohler stepped forward so that the toes of his tennis shoes hung over the water. Each man shot his convictions into the other’s stare. Kohler’s shoulders twitched, just enough to give life to the “Atlantic Wreck Divers” patch spread winglike across his back. Chatterton hated the jacket and took another step forward. Ordinarily, either of them might have pressed the plunger then. Tonight, however, neither moved farther. Feldman was just eight days dead and still missing. Brennan stepped forward and said, “Here, Richie, hand me your shit.” With that, Chatterton returned to packing his gear and Kohler stepped onto the Seeker for his first trip to the mystery U-boat.

  The Seeker left Brielle around midnight. Kohler and Brennan remained on deck, watching the shoreline disappear and debating the wreck. Kohler believed, as he had on first hearing of the discovery, that the divers had found the Spikefish, the World War II American submarine sunk in the 1960s for target practice. Brennan insisted it was a German U-boat and told Kohler, “When you get down there you’ll know. You’ll hear the music.”

  Chatterton splashed first and tied in the grapple. His plan was trademark: shoot video, forgo artifacts, return with knowledge. He often used video cameras, which picked up underwater nuances that were beyond the human eye, then watched the tapes topside, learning wreck topographies and planning his second dive. At home, he watched the tapes dozens of times more.

  Chatterton swam into the gaping hole in the submarine’s side and turned his camera in all directions, careful to record the way in which the mechanical chaos splaying from the boat’s wounds might catch and trap a diver. He then backed out and swam over the wreck, first toward the forward torpedo-loading hatch, then to the stern area, where, except for a portion of one blade, the propeller lay buried in the sand. When his time ran out, he returned to the anchor line and began his ascent. Once again, he would finish a dive without recovering an artifact.

  Kohler and Brennan followed. Immediately, Kohler recognized the narrowness of the wreck for a submarine. The divers swam aft and above the ship until reaching an open hatch. The sight stopped Kohler in his tracks—submarine hatches were supposed to be closed. He shined his light inside. A ladder led downward into darkness.

  “Someone had to have opened that hatch,” Kohler thought. He envisioned water flooding in and men screaming and scrambling up the ladder and opening that hatch to escape.

  Kohler pulled his head out of the hatch and he and Brennan began their ascent to the surface. Kohler had hoped to find some artifact, anything, written in English to prove that the submarine was the Spikefish, but he’d found nothing. When he climbed aboard the Seeker, he undressed and sat down for lunch in the salon. Nearby, Chatterton studied his videotape on the room’s tiny television. Other divers discussed their findings. No one, it turned out, had recovered anything meaningful.

  Around noon, Chatterton dressed for his second dive. Brennan, slightly bent and achy in his joints from his dive, packed his gear away and called it a day. Kohler geared up by himself and would make his second dive alone. He and Chatterton never considered diving together, but the two of them splashed within minutes of each other.

  This time Chatterton intended to penetrate the submarine. He swam toward the fallen conning tower, which lay beside the submarine like a mobster gunned down beside his car. A single pipe connected the fallen tower to the body of the submarine. From diagrams he had seen, Chatterton recognized the pipe as one of the ship’s two periscopes. He drifted inside the conning tower, where the periscope’s other end remained in its protective metal housing, a kind of armor shaped like a Spartan’s helmet with a section cut out for the lens. Chatterton recalled having seen a builder’s plaque attached to the periscope housing in photographs of the U-505. He doubled back to the control room and searched for the plaque inside this cramped conning tower but found nothing—whatever identification might have existed here had been eaten away by nature or disintegrated through violence. At the top of the conning tower he saw the hatch that allowed crewmen to enter and exit. The hatch was open.

  Chatterton reversed field and exited the conning tower. He now faced the submarine’s gaping hole. He swam inside and then through a small circular hatch, the one through which crewmen ducked when traveling between the control room and the officers’ quarters or the sound and radio rooms. The bulkhead that connected the hatch to the submarine’s body was blown out on the port side, a condition Chatterton knew must have resulted from a devastating force. He finger-walked forward, meticulously avoiding the forest of bent pipes, jagged metal, and traumatized electrical cables that blurted from walls and ceiling. The water inside the submarine was still, the particulates scarce and hovering. The submarine’s ribs, intact and visible, arched across the curved ceiling. Chatterton was likely now in the sound and radio rooms and across from the commander’s quarters. He continued forward, jutting left through one rectangular doorway and right through another, until he came to an area filled with elbow-shaped pipes and cracked metal flooring. Something tugged at his instincts. He studied his Chicago memories, the movies he had made of U-505 collapsing around him. There might be a cabinet here, he thought, though it likely would not look like a cabinet anymore. He swam left and shined his light. Dark fish with white whiskers scurried away. He stopped moving and allowed his eyes to adjust. A cabinet shape appeared before him as if from a vapor. He still did not move. The rims of bowls and plates seemed to protrude from the cabinet. He swam forward and reached for the china. Two bowls came loose. He brought them to his face. The fronts were white with green rims. On the backs, engraved in black, was the year 1942. Above that marking were the eagle and the swastika, the symbol of Hitler’s Third Reich.

  At the same time, Kohler was completing his second dive. He had swum to the open hatch inside the U-boat’s hole, but by this time Chatterton had disturbed the visibility enough so that Kohler did not dare enter. Instead, he ventured inside the fallen conning tower and found a piece of speaker tube, the kind a crewman would talk into, but it revealed no writing. He stuffed it in his goody bag and began his ascent to the surface.

  Chatterton checked his watch and saw that it was time to go. Foot by foot he retraced his path, until he emerged from the submarine and found the anchor line. He was exuberant as he ascended—his planning and homework had paid off. He would give Nagle one of these bowls. The look on the captain’s face would be priceless.

  For nearly an hour, both Chatterton and Kohler ascended and decompressed, each unaware that the other was nearby. At 30 feet, Chatterton caught up to Kohler and settled just below him. Kohler angled his head sideways to steal a glimpse at Chatterton’s bag. Kohler could not contain himself—he lived for artifacts and was powerless at the sight of a bulging goody bag. He released the anchor line and drifted down to Chatterton. The divers were now eye to eye. The unmistakable bone white of china seemed to light the ocean around Chatterton. Kohler’s face flushed and his heart pounded. There was history in Chatterton’s bag; he could smell it. He reached for the bag.

  Chatterton snatched the bag away and turned his shoulder to block Kohler. The divers’ bodies tensed. Their eyes locked. No one moved for what seemed like minutes. The men did not like each other. They did not like what the other represented. And you don’t touch a guy’s shit. But as Chatterton searched Kohler’s eyes he could not find anything sinister in them; the man was just flat-out excited to see the china. Chatterton opened his shoulder, slowly at first, and pushed the bag forward. Through the mesh Kohler could see the eagle and swastika and he erupted, screaming through his regulato
r, “Holy shit! You did it! I can’t believe this! You did it!” For a minute he danced like a child as he held the bag, twirling and kicking and punching Chatterton in the arm, looking away and then back again to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. Now there was no doubt. The divers had discovered a German U-boat.

  Chatterton did his best to block Kohler’s celebration punches as the two ascended to their next stop. On board the Seeker, Nagle held the bowls and could only repeat, “Fuckin’-A . . . fuckin’-A . . .” The other divers slapped Chatterton’s back and snapped photos of him holding the bowls.

  As the Seeker steamed home and many of the divers retired to the salon to sleep, Chatterton and Kohler found themselves sitting together atop a cooler. The trip had overwhelmed Kohler; it had brought together, in a single day, his passions for naval history, submarines, exploration, and artifacts. It had made him feel a part of history. For a while, he and Chatterton discussed the U-boat’s construction, its damage, those open hatches. Neither of them mentioned Atlantic Wreck Divers or Bielenda or the past.

  “You know, this was the most exciting dive of my life,” Kohler told Chatterton. “The whole thing was once in a lifetime. But the part I liked best was the time we spent in the water just looking at those dishes. For a while, you and I were the only two people in the world who knew this was a U-boat. The only two in the world.”

  Chatterton nodded. He understood what Kohler meant. He could tell that Kohler was not talking about diving now, he was talking about life, and he thought it would not be a bad thing to get to know this man better.

  CHAPTER SIX

  RICHIE KOHLER

  IF EVER A PERSON had been born to dive a virgin U-boat, that person was Richie Kohler.

  In 1968, Richard and Frances Kohler moved with their three young children into a house in Marine Park, a close-knit Italian and Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn where kids ran chores for elderly widows and immigrants grew figs in their narrow backyards. Richard, a twenty-eight-year-old owner of a glass business, was of German descent and proud of it. Frances, twenty-seven, had her roots in Sicily and was equally proud of her heritage. Each aimed to instill their sense of culture in the children, especially in six-year-old Richie, who was now old enough to appreciate such flavors. As the Kohlers raised Richie, however, they noticed that something unusual was going on with their boy. He read voraciously, but not the big-print kiddie stuff typical of first graders. Instead he studied National Geographic, war histories, and anything concerning outer space. When nothing remained in the house to read, he started over and read everything again. His mother asked if he might not rather be outside playing with other kids and rolling around and getting dirty. He asked his mother to subscribe to Popular Mechanics. Frances did not know whether to celebrate or call a doctor. She had never met a person—child or adult—so relentless in his pursuit of answers.

  Frances bought her son more books, and Richie kept reading—military biographies, battle narratives, weapons manuals, and anything that celebrated bravery. Before long, Frances had to force Richie outside.

  When Richie discovered the Apollo program, the idea of penetrating an alien environment and then mastering it seemed too wonderful to believe. He read about Neil Armstrong and that settled it—he would be an astronaut. He drank Tang for energy, dressed his G.I. Joes in homemade tinfoil “space suits,” and pleaded with his mother to buy Swanson TV dinners—the closest facsimile to space food available in Brooklyn.

  All the while, his father worked grueling hours building his glass business. In between, he committed himself to the proper raising of his children. He appreciated Richie’s love of reading, but he also wanted the boy to toughen up, to learn the kinds of lessons no one published in books. He taught his son to do physical things—at home, at his shop, on his boat—and he assigned him important responsibilities. Richie could cut glass at seven, and had mastered the circular saw by eight. When Richie faltered, Kohler would rail, “Are you stupid?” or “Don’t be so dumb!” and Richie’s chin would drop to his chest—he worshiped his father, and it crushed him to disappoint the strongest man in the world. Richie’s mother recoiled from the words. “How could you say that?” she’d ask. “You know how your own father hurt you with those words. How could you do the same to your son?” Richard Kohler could not answer her.

  Soon Richie wanted to please his father even more than he wanted to be an astronaut. When his dad asked, “You play with G.I. Joes? With dolls?” Richie switched to building models of warships and fighter planes. When his father took him boating and gave him important jobs, he trembled at the idea of tying the wrong knot or steering too close to an obstruction—the idea of being called stupid virtually caused the rope to fall from his hands. Yet he was tying and steering by himself on the open ocean with his father—what seven-year-old kid in his neighborhood did that? Before long, Richie could do things teenagers could not, all because his father believed he could and made certain he could.

  Even as Richie continued to gobble history, another kind of education was taking hold in him. Each of his parents leaned harder into teaching him to be proud of his heritage. The smell of Frances’s Sicilian cooking, her family’s instinct to hug and pinch cheeks and leave lipstick marks, the forgoing of meat on Fridays, the embrace of open emotion, the sounds of neighbors screaming to kids in Sicilian dialects—these were the marks of Richie’s Italian roots. He looked the part, too. His thick black hair, sculpted to the side Donny Osmond style, was shag carpeting against a brush’s drag. His skin was the olive color at the bottom of his mother’s imported bottles of extra-virgin oil, his eyes the brown of playground bark. His eyebrows drooped at the ends like the arms of a football player being helped from the field, but they were storytelling eyebrows, the kind that cock and dip into action when the passionate describe their lives. When he was young, Richie’s eyebrows were always in motion, even when he read.

  Richie’s father countered that as Germans, he and Richie were part of a hardworking and honest people who accepted neither handouts nor grief. His overarching philosophy was “If you want more, you have to be more,” and he imparted this to Richie relentlessly. He warned Richie to be proud of his heritage and never to allow anyone in this “Guinea” neighborhood—or the world for that matter—to tell him he was less for being German. Richie had already developed a foundational German pride from reading books and watching history programs, and he noticed from these sources that whatever people thought of Germans, they always respected their instinct for excellence.

  Most indelible, perhaps, were his father’s memories of Mr. Segal, a neighbor he had idolized as a boy. Segal, a German immigrant, had been the strong man in a German circus and had traveled the land several times before fleeing as Hitler rose to power. Segal had told Richard Kohler of the country he had loved, a land of craftsmen who built beautiful things, of leading scientists and artists, of storybook villages with ancient traditions, of quiet pride and a deep work ethic. Before Mr. Segal, Kohler never thought to consider his heritage. After Mr. Segal, Kohler was German. Sometimes Richie’s father seemed to lose himself in these memories of Mr. Segal, as if he were a kid himself again, and young Richie could hear then that his father considered Mr. Segal his hero, and this idea overwhelmed the boy, the idea of a man so strong as to be a hero to his hero.

  Richie began to focus his reading on German history, especially World War II. On television he noticed that Germans were often portrayed as sneaky rats, and he wondered why people thought Germans were so bad when it was this one monster, Hitler, who had hurt the country. He read about Germany before the war and how Hitler had come to power. Whenever school required a research project or book report, he wrote about the German side. The name Kohler, he told people in his neighborhood, came from the German word for “coal miner.”

  As Richie gulped more history, he noticed that he thought differently about things than his peers did. Many of them liked to read about war and battles, but only Richie seemed interested
in the lives of the soldiers. He wondered about weird things his friends never considered—about the letters soldiers wrote when pinned down in a bunker, about why privates always seemed to long for the little stuff at home the most, about the childhood of a fighter pilot, about how a family felt when they got word that their son had been killed. When he saw photographs in books of soldiers lying dead on the battlefield, he hoped that the book was not available in those soldiers’ hometowns.

  Though Richie’s father worked grueling hours, he made certain to spend time with his children on weekends. He was not, however, the type of father to toss a baseball or attend school plays. If Richie wanted to be with his dad—and he did very much—he would have to do so on his dad’s terms, which always meant on the boat.

  Often he quivered while his father watched him tie the bowline or wax the chrome handrails because he knew that if he faltered his father might call him names or say, “Don’t be so useless!” When he did things right, however, he was elated. His father allowed him great responsibility aboard the boat, and soon Richie began to absorb his father’s “no matter what”—the idea that if he set his mind to it, there was nothing he could not do.

  Offshore, the world expanded before the seven-year-old’s already wide eyes. Richie’s father loved to fish and, like all fishermen, owned a book of numbers, a passport to secret places. Often they fished the shipwrecks, and while they watched their poles Kohler told his son that row after row of wrecks lay beneath them courtesy of the German U-boats, fantastic hunting machines that had thrived in the most hostile environments on earth. To Richie, who had dreamed of conquering the alien environment of outer space, the idea of such a machine operating decades ago, in his own neighborhood, seemed more amazing than the science fiction he watched on TV. When their boating trips took them through the Rockaway Inlet, Richie asked about the circular stone pillar built into the water, equidistant from Brooklyn and Breezy Point; it looked like a castle. His father explained that the Army Corps of Engineers had used the structure to string steel nets underwater to block the U-boats from entering Jamaica Bay. “Can you believe that, Richie?” his father asked. “The Germans came right here. Look, you can see the Verrazano Bridge. That’s how close the U-boats came.” Richie reveled in the information, but did not breathe a word of it to friends. To him, knowledge of U-boats on America’s front porch was a secret only fishermen like him and his father should share.