Shadow Divers

by Robert Kurson

  “Get him onto the dressing table!” Chatterton ordered. Kohler and others dragged Chrissy to the table and began cutting off his gear. Barb Lander, a nurse by profession, force-fed Chrissy aspirin and water and put an oxygen mask over his face.

  “I fucked up, I fucked up, I fucked up!” Chrissy yelled. “I can’t move my legs!”

  Lander cradled his head.

  “You’re okay, Chrissy,” she said. “You’re on the Seeker now.”

  Chrissy thrashed and screamed and tried to tear the oxygen mask from his face.

  “I can’t breathe!” he screamed. “I’m burning! A monster pinned me! I was trapped!”

  At the ladder, Chatterton turned his attention to Chris.

  “Chris! Chris! Come on, you’re next. You can do it! Let’s go!” Chatterton yelled.

  Chris looked into Chatterton’s eyes.

  “I’m not going to make it,” he said. “Tell Sue I’m sorry.”

  Chris’s chin dropped to his chest and his head flopped into the water. Chatterton and Kohler, both dressed in street clothes, leaped into the freezing ocean. Chatterton lunged for Chris’s head and lifted it into the air.

  “Get me a knife!” Chatterton yelled. The Seeker bashed up and down in the Atlantic, hurling Chatterton and Kohler underwater. When the boat rose, Chatterton yelled, “I gotta cut his rig off!”

  Kohler pointed to a knife sheathed on Chris’s shoulder. Chatterton grabbed it and slashed at the diver’s harness until Chris’s rig fell away. Chatterton then muscled Chris into a fireman’s carry and brought him up the ladder, straining to hang on as the Seeker heaved and exploded into the ocean and sent salt water spraying into the men’s eyes. Kohler looked inside Chris’s mask, praying to see more dread because dread would mean that Chris was still alive. Chris only stared straight ahead. The men dragged him onto the Seeker’s deck, his fins sloshing along the sea-soaked wood. Chatterton began CPR on the elder Rouse.

  For a few moments, Chris did not respond to Chatterton’s efforts. His skin began to turn blue. Kohler murmured, “Come on, Chris, don’t let go . . . don’t let go . . . don’t let go . . .” Chatterton kept relentlessly at his CPR. Suddenly, Chris threw up into Chatterton’s mouth, and Chatterton could taste the Pepsi he and Chris had shared that morning. Kohler sprang to his feet, hopeful that the vomiting indicated revival. Chatterton looked up at Kohler with eyes from 1970 Vietnam.

  “Richie, go in the wheelhouse,” Chatterton said with a calm that seemed to Kohler to mute the raging ocean. “Get pencil and paper. Write down times and events. Be sure to get everything Barb’s doing on that table and everything Chrissy is saying. Make sure she gets vital signs on him. Record everything. We’ll need to send this information with the Coast Guard.”

  Chatterton continued the CPR, but with each compression he felt increasing resistance, evidence that Chris’s blood was turning to foam and clotting in his body. After five minutes, Chris’s heart stopped and his skin turned from blue to coal gray. The whites of his eyes were bloody. Chatterton knew he was dead. He kept pumping anyway. You did not give up on a human being just because he was dead.

  At the dressing table, Lander pushed Chrissy’s long brown hair out of his face and held his head in her lap as he writhed and screamed and drifted in and out of lucidity.

  “The monster got me!” he screamed. “A monster pinned me. Monkeyfuck! It was a monkeyfuck!”

  Kohler bit his bottom lip and took notes.

  “My father! How is my father?” Chrissy asked.

  Kohler and Lander looked toward Chatterton as he pumped away on Chris’s lifeless body. They knew Chris had died.

  “John’s with your father,” Kohler told him. “He’s on oxygen. He’s gonna be fine. Hang in, Chrissy. Can you tell me what happened?”

  Chrissy went calm and for a moment spoke with a crystalline mind. He told Kohler that something had fallen and pinned him inside the wreck, that his father had come in and freed him, and that while they were ascending he had run out of air. Then, just as quickly, Chrissy spiraled back into delirium.

  “I was in the wreck and fuck this! I’m cold! I’m hot! I can’t feel my legs!”

  Lander stroked his head.

  “Please shoot me!” Chrissy begged. “It hurts so bad. Someone find a gun and shoot me. Please kill me. Dad! Dad!”

  For the next ninety minutes, Chatterton and others continued CPR on Chris’s dead body. Crowell, who had cut the anchor line, headed thirty degrees into the wind as instructed by the Coast Guard, then began a head count. Each diver called out, “Here.” Crowell dropped the Seeker’s antennas to allow the helicopter to approach unobstructed. He ordered everyone into life jackets, then demanded that any loose items be moved into the salon or secured to the deck; the helicopter’s prop wash could turn a loose face mask into a deadly missile or suck up a sleeping bag into its rotors and crash.

  On the horizon, the divers could see the orange-and-white Coast Guard chopper speeding toward them. All but Chatterton, Kohler, and Lander ran into the salon to stay out of its way. As the chopper lowered its shoulder and swooped toward the Seeker, the whine of its jet engines blanketed the sky and its rotors made an upside-down rainstorm of the water still sloshing on the deck. The chopper settled to a hover just over the Seeker’s bow and strained to hold its position in the roiling winds. From the side door, a muscular search-and-rescue swimmer dressed in a Day-Glo orange dry suit, gloves, hood, goggles, and fins jumped feetfirst toward the ocean, one hand stretched across his stomach, the other holding his mask, a perfect dart into a violent sea. As he surfaced, he threw a medical bag onto the Seeker’s deck and climbed aboard the boat. He made no introductions and offered no welcome gestures. Instead, he strode directly to Chatterton.

  “You’re a little slow on those chest compressions,” the swimmer said from behind rounded goggles. “It should be one-two . . . one-two . . .”

  “I’ve been doing CPR on this guy for ninety minutes,” Chatterton answered, still pushing into Chris’s chest. “He’s dead.”

  The swimmer pivoted and looked at Chrissy, who still had color in his face and was writhing in pain.

  “Okay, we’re going to take both these guys—one at a time,” the swimmer said.

  “Listen to me,” Chatterton told the swimmer. “I’m telling you this guy is dead. We need to take all our prayers and fucking hope and energy and throw it into that kid, who’s still alive. Forget the old man. If he were to sit up, he’d tell you the same thing.”

  “That’s not the way we do it,” the swimmer said. “We’re taking both of them. One at a time.”

  Now Chatterton was in the Vietnamese jungle. Bullets flew past his ears and staccatoed the dirt. Long-atrophied triage instincts flared to life.

  “Taking the old man will cost you twenty minutes,” Chatterton said. “Take the son and rush him to a recompression chamber as fast as possible. The time you waste with the father might cost the kid his life. I’m begging you. Forget the father.”

  “Not possible,” the swimmer said. “We take them both. One at a time.”

  The swimmer radioed to the chopper to move in and drop the basket. A moment later, the metal stretcher was being lowered by cable toward the Seeker.

  “No one touch anything!” the swimmer yelled. “This thing has a static charge that can blow you off your feet. Let the basket hit the boat’s rail and discharge first.”

  The basket pendulumed in the howling winds before hitting a rail on the Seeker and exploding with the discharge of static electricity. The swimmer ran to the basket, unclipped it, and waved the chopper away to ease the effects of its prop wash.

  The swimmer pulled the basket toward Chrissy, who was now bundled in a blanket, still screaming for his legs, still telling stories about monsters. He placed Chrissy inside and crossed his arms mummy-style. The helicopter dragged its cable through the water until it hit the boat. Chatterton, Kohler, and the swimmer lifted Chrissy’s basket onto the gunwale and attached the cable. A moment l
ater, the helicopter was heaving Chrissy into the sky.

  “Look, I’m begging you,” Chatterton told the swimmer. “Leave now. The kid’s life depends on this. It’s going to take twenty minutes to get that basket back down here to load up a guy who’s already dead.”

  “Not possible,” the swimmer said.

  Chatterton whirled toward Kohler.

  “Richie, take all the information you gathered—all the vital signs and notes and dive profiles—and put them in a waterproof bag. Then go into the salon and get the Rouses’ wallets—it will be hectic and messy in there, but you will be able to find them if you stay with it. Put the wallets in the bag, too. Make certain that this swimmer leaves with that bag.”

  Kohler bolted for the salon. He tore through sleeping bags, dumped duffel bags, and overturned suitcases until he found both wallets, then rifled through the kitchen drawers until he found a Ziploc bag. Lander gave him the vital signs, notes, and dive profiles, and he packaged everything and made true the seal. As he opened the salon’s door, he was blasted by seawater and winds from the chopper’s blades. He pushed forward and pressed the bag into the swimmer’s hands.

  Now the basket was coming down for Chris. Chatterton continued his chest compressions, muttering, “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch . . .” In the jungle he could have run to save Chrissy—he always ran—and even when the grunts shook their heads he ran anyway, because it was the right thing to do and because it had always been in him to run. Here, as the chopper sent a basket for a dead guy while a live kid’s blood foamed and choked his heart, Chatterton had nowhere to run, and that finality drowned him, because he had never in his life been unable to run.

  It took twenty minutes to load Chris onto the chopper. After both Rouses were aboard, the helicopter lowered the basket a final time for the swimmer. The jet engines screamed as the chopper swooped away and raced toward the recompression chamber at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx.

  One by one the divers made their way from the salon and toward Chatterton. Each thanked him or hugged him. Everyone knew that Chris was dead. Everyone believed Chrissy would make it.

  The trip back to Brielle was somber but hopeful. Hospital recompression could take hours; the divers hoped to get word of Chrissy’s condition by the next morning. The metal schematic, which had held so much promise and which had brought such optimism, lay forgotten, wrapped in a towel in a Tupperware container.

  That evening Lander called Chatterton at home.

  “Chrissy didn’t make it,” she said. “He died in the chamber.”

  Chatterton put down the receiver. In thirty-six years, there had been several thousand dives on the Andrea Doria, the most dangerous of all shipwrecks. Six people had died. In a single year, the U-Who had claimed three lives. Chatterton walked into his office. For months he had come here to gaze at the Horenburg knife and ask, “Who are you? What happened to you?” This time his eyes went through the knife. He sat for hours, not asking much of anything.

  CHAPTER TEN

  HISTORY MAULED

  SHORTLY AFTER THE ROUSES DIED, Chatterton and Kohler set out for the U-Who to retrieve the fallen divers’ equipment. They had heard reports of Chrissy’s recompression-chamber experience at Jacobi. The bubbles in his system had turned his blood into sludge. Kohler smoked thirty cigarettes on the way to the wreck and wondered how long he could continue refusing the voodoo of trimix in favor of air.

  Inside the wreck’s galley, Chatterton shot footage of the fallen cabinet and shelves. The tangled penetration line Chrissy had relied on for navigation had been twisted around the ten-foot-long piece of canvas he had worked to excavate. In the now-pristine visibility, Chatterton recognized this canvas as part of a life raft. Its German writing gave generic instructions for use. Outside the wreck, Kohler discovered the three stage bottles the divers had not been able to find in their confusion. Each was marked “Rouse.” None of them was inscribed with a first name; the tanks were interchangeable between father and son.

  At home, Chatterton and Kohler returned to the business of research. Now armed with the information from the schematic, they tore into their reference books in search of Type IXC U-boats built at Germany’s Deschimag-Bremen shipyard. Fifty-two such U-boats, it turned out, had never returned from patrol. That list of fifty-two, the divers agreed, could easily be narrowed. Over rib eyes at Scotty’s, they agreed on two exclusionary parameters:

  1. Eliminate any U-boat in which crewmen survived the sinking. If there were survivors, the U-boat’s identity would be known and accurate in the historical record.

  2. Eliminate any U-boat built with a deck gun. The divers had already determined that the U-Who had been built without a deck gun; any Type IX constructed at Deschimag-Bremen with that weapon, therefore, could not be the U-Who.

  Chatterton and Kohler set out for Washington to begin the elimination process. Reference books indicated that there had been survivors on twenty-two of the fifty-two U-boats on their list. That left thirty U-boats to consider. Of these, ten had been built with deck guns. The list was now down to twenty possible U-boats.

  “One of these U-boats on this single piece of notebook paper is our sub,” Kohler said.

  “We are now looking at the answer,” Chatterton said. “We just have to narrow this list down further.”

  Neither man could remember having been so excited. This was original research. This was exploration.

  Back in New Jersey, the divers took their usual table at Scotty’s and began to brainstorm. They needed additional exclusionary criteria to further narrow the list of twenty. They quickly settled on a plan. They would return to the BdU KTBs—the German war diaries—to inspect where U-boat headquarters had ordered and plotted each of the remaining U-boats on their list. Any submarine the Germans believed to be operating more than a few hundred miles from the U.S. East Coast would be eliminated from the list of twenty. After all, the Germans would know better than anyone where their U-boats were patrolling.

  The divers planned to return to Washington the next week. Chatterton would research half the boats, Kohler the other half. At midnight the night before the trip, Kohler’s phone rang. The caller did not speak. The only evidence of another person on the other end was the sound of ice clinking in a glass. That sound meant the caller was Nagle.

  “Hey, Richie, it’s me,” Nagle said. “Think we’ll ever figure out this U-boat?”

  “Sure, Billy, we will,” Kohler said. “What’s going on? It’s midnight.”

  “Ah, I’m sitting here alone just thinking about the U-boat. You know, Richie, sometimes I just want to end it all . . .”

  “What are you talking about, Bill?”

  “This is bullshit, Richie. I got my gun right here. I should blow my fucking head off right now.”

  “Whoa, Bill, hold on. You got everything in the world, man. You got a boat, a beautiful family back in Pennsylvania, money, a nice house. All you gotta do is run a boat. That’s a nice life. I’ll take that life.”

  “Ah, you ain’t got no clue!” Nagle exploded. “Feldman’s dead. The Rouses are dead. My old friend John Dudas is dead. I see all these dead guys in my dreams, Richie. I gotta go . . .”

  Nagle hung up. Kohler’s fingers pounded out Chatterton’s phone number.

  “John, it’s Richie. Bill’s gonna kill himself—”

  “He does this sometimes,” Chatterton said, still groggy. “He’s in a terrible way. I’ve tried to intervene. His family has intervened, his girlfriend, too. I’ve taken him to rehabs. You know what he does? He takes a few weeks off. He gets himself just well enough to enjoy drinking again, checks himself out, then stops at the liquor store on the way home. I don’t think he’ll kill himself, at least not with a gun. I think Jim Beam’s the weapon of choice.”

  “Can we do anything?” Kohler asked.

  “We’ve all been trying for years,” Chatterton said. “I don’t know what else anyone can do.”

  The divers returned to Washington and attacked th
e U-boat Control diaries. According to the German records, eighteen of the twenty U-boats on the divers’ list had been operating in or ordered to areas so distant from New Jersey as to be unworthy of further consideration.

  That left two U-boats—U-857 and U-879. According to the diaries, each of these submarines had been ordered to attack targets of opportunity on the American East Coast. As the divers read further they came upon a bombshell. Both of these submarines had been docked in Norway, in early 1945—the same place and roughly the same date as Horenburg’s boat, U-869.

  “That could explain the knife!” Kohler said.

  “Exactly,” Chatterton said. “Maybe Horenburg lent the knife to a guy on the U-boat next to his. Maybe he lost it and it ended up on a nearby boat. Maybe someone stole it. Any way you look at it, the knife now makes sense. One of these two submarines has got to be the U-Who. It’s either U-857 or U-879. We’re down to two U-boats.”

  The divers rushed to their history books. According to these texts, U-857 had been sunk off Boston by the USS Gustafson, while U-879 had been destroyed off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, by the USS Buckley and USS Reuben James. That seemed to leave no chance that the mystery wreck was either U-857 or U-879.

  “Let’s do this,” Chatterton said. “Let’s check the files for the sinkings of these two subs. Let’s see for ourselves what the navy says about how these two U-boats were killed.”

  “Are you saying these two U-boats might not have been sunk where the history books say they were?” Kohler asked.

  “I’m saying we have to check,” Chatterton said. “I’m getting the feeling we have to check everything.”

  It was evening by now, so the divers packed their gear and found a thirty-five-dollar motel room on the city’s outskirts. The next morning they returned to the NHC, drooling to get at the navy files for their remaining two U-boats, one of which had to be the answer to their mystery.