The Last Dive

by Bernie Chowdhury

  The condition of the U-Who tells the story of the Battle for the Atlantic, whose outcome the British wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, once stated was his greatest worry in the war. The U-Who rests upright on the Atlantic’s sandy bottom in three distinct pieces, almost like a large cigar with a section torn out of its middle and left to rest alongside. The section that was blown off is the heart of the U-boat: its control room and, originally directly above it, the large stack known as the conning tower, which protruded upward, perpendicular to the rest of the cylindrical vessel. The control room is shattered, and the conning tower lies derelict on its side. It doesn’t take an explosives expert to figure out that the U-boat was blown apart and that the men inside didn’t stand a chance. Sharp, jagged pieces of wreckage are strewn all about the sea bottom, and, though the wreck’s maws offer entrance, such an undertaking is not for the faint of heart.

  U-boats that sank in divable waters have gone from being wartime trophy hunters to being trophies themselves, war relics and graveyards ripe for exploration and plundering. Although divers regularly dive U-boats, their activities are not without controversy. At the start of every diving season, the German naval attaché to the German embassy in Washington, D.C., had his assistant send to charter dive-boat captains a strongly worded letter declaring that diving on U-boats should cease immediately because the wrecks are war graves. The Rouses, and many other Americans, thought this was the height of German audacity: They knew that U-boats had aggressively roamed the world’s oceans to sink many ships and inflict a heavy toll of lives. Why shouldn’t the onetime ship hunters be hunted and peaceably explored themselves?

  Not only moral issues arose around diving the U-Who. Its location did not appear in any naval archive, German or otherwise. Was the U-Who on a secret mission? Perhaps some of the Nazi leaders had tried to escape via U-boat and were on Chatterton’s mystery wreck. Rumors persisted that Martin Bormann, second only to Hitler in the Nazi party hierarchy, eluded prosecution at the Nuremberg war crimes trials and certain execution by escaping the Third Reich via U-boat before the German surrender. Although the Allies believed they had come across the bodily remains of Martin Bormann in Berlin, many people were not convinced that the scant body parts were Bormann’s.

  The escape scenario was not far-fetched. Other Nazis had managed to avoid immediate retribution, including the infamous Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Gestapo’s department of Jewish affairs, which oversaw the transport of Jews to concentration camps and their execution. Eichmann was captured in Argentina by Israeli secret service agents in 1960, sent to Israel, tried as a war criminal, and executed in 1962.

  Maybe the U-Who had been carrying spies. The theory was plausible. In June 1942, two U-boats had successfully landed German agents on U.S. soil. One group was landed on Long Island and another in Florida. In both cases, the spies were rounded up relatively quickly; six were executed and two who cooperated, Ernst Burger and Georg Dasch, were given lengthy prison sentences. After the war, in 1948, both Burger and Dasch were given clemency by President Truman and both men were returned to West Germany. Perhaps the U-Who had been trying to land spies and its mission papers were among the many records that were either burned by the Germans toward the war’s end or destroyed in bombing attacks.

  Valuable cargo could also have been concealed on the U-boat. During the war, several U-boats had gone back and forth between Germany and her ally Japan, carrying much-needed raw materials for exchange. Or could the U-Who have been on its way to South America with valuable material? Of course, if that was the case, why did the U-boat come so close to the North American coast?

  There was only one way to remove all doubt about U-Who: recover something that would clearly identify the wreck, and then research that vessel’s war mission from surviving U-boat records. Chris and Chrissy Rouse knew that whoever uncovered the mystery would become well known, not only among divers but to the world at large. Exploring the U-Who, they would dive for fame.

  10

  The Last Dive

  Toll the bell, call up the ghosts, summon out the lifesavers and the pirates.

  The shoals are there still, the winds howl loud, the rain beats down, the waves burst strong. Some night, in the chill darkness, someone will make a mistake: The sea will show him no mercy.

  JOHN T. CUNNINGHAM

  OCTOBER 12, 1992. NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN,

  approximately 60 miles offshore,

  equidistant from the New Jersey and New York coastlines.

  CHRIS ROUSE DIDN’T NEED to watch his only child descending the Seeker’s anchor line in front of him to know what he was doing, what actions he was taking. Four years into their romance with deep water, he had dived so often with Chrissy that father and son had developed a sixth sense with each other when underwater. Regardless of what was happening in their lives on land, regardless of whatever difficulties they had at any given moment as father and son, they each knew they could count on the other in the unforgiving underwater landscapes they loved to explore together. They would need that special skill today. The ocean surface snarled with waves, which piled a new set of challenges on top of the usual dangers of diving. Chris had over seven hundred and Chrissy over six hundred dives under their belts, valuable experience that they would need today if they were going to be successful in recovering the captain’s logbook from the mysterious U-boat that lay 230 feet below the Seeker.

  The U-Who’s captain’s logbook was an artifact that would positively identify the U-boat for which information was missing from American, British, and German archives. That log would help settle the question of whether the U-boat had been on a secret wartime mission, or whether it carried high-ranking Nazi party members or valuable artworks. It would be the Rouses’ chance to secure for themselves a place in the pantheon of underwater exploration as discoverers of a piece of martial history and sleuths who helped solve a mystery.

  The Rouses had already dived this wreck before; they knew the contours of what they would be seeing and where to go. As wrecks go, U-boats are not hard to navigate if they sank relatively intact. Even with its totally destroyed control room and blown-off conning tower, the U-Who did not pose a great navigational challenge.

  What did threaten to daunt them was the weather. Topside, the waves had increased and now ran three to six feet in height, making the 60-foot Seeker rock uncomfortably for the divers on board. After dives like this Chris would confide to friends that the extra work of diving in the open ocean made him feel every one of his thirty-nine years. The Seeker’s two captains, Dan Crowell and John Chatterton, had warned them and everyone else that the weather was only getting worse. This meant that when their dive on the U-boat was over, they would be heading home and would probably not get another chance this year to solve the U-boat mystery. They’d prepared for this dive for so long that they were determined to go ahead, questionable weather or not.

  They had goaded themselves into this dive when they had awakened to the overcast, windy morning. When Chrissy informed his father that he did not want to dive in such rough conditions, his father verbally abused him, questioning his diving ability and his courage. When Chrissy accepted the challenge, it was Chris who backed down, not wanting to dive. The tables were turned: Chrissy verbally laced into his father, returning the insults about diving ability, and even questioning his father’s manhood. Ultimately, both divers had to dive to prove that they were real divers. Their bickering had gone on for hours as the Seeker was continuously rocked by the waves. The Rouses fit right in among a world of often eccentric and egocentric participants, and they earned their Bicker Brothers nickname on every dive expedition.

  The Rouses planned to make the dive breathing air. Only two weeks before this moment, Chris had said to me, “Bernie, don’t worry, we’ll be fine. We’ve gone deeper on air and we’ll be able to handle it.” There were better choices for a breathing mix than air, and as an experienced wreck explorer I was concerned when they told me their dive plan. To go i
nside the notoriously cramped quarters of a U-boat at a depth of 230 feet while breathing air was extremely risky. The rough wave conditions would make Chris and Chrissy breathe harder as they gripped the anchor line and fought to stay on the violently snapping rope to prevent themselves from being blown off the line and away from the wreck they intended to explore. The extra work involved in fighting their way down to the wreck would have a more immediate effect on Chris and Chrissy: The nitrogen in the air they were breathing would get even more narcotic because of their increased labor, just as it had done to me during the nearly fatal dive that had left me hospitalized and temporarily crippled a year earlier. The greatly increased pressure underwater would affect their brains like alcohol, as it does the brain of every deep-sea diver breathing air. If they had chosen to breathe a mixture containing helium, their narcosis would have been greatly reduced, even with the extra effort required to descend in such a raging sea. But helium gas is expensive. Chris could not afford it now that his excavating business was doing so poorly.

  The increased narcosis would first make itself felt as fuzzy vision. Their peripheral vision would also be affected, and their field of vision would get ever narrower as they got closer to the wreck, as if they were entering a dark tunnel. After a dive he and his father had done to 300 feet on air, Chrissy had once described sounds being weirdly distorted, as if vibrating in different pitch intensities. When he related that story to me, twenty-one-year-old Chrissy had laughed like a young boy who had discovered something mischievously satisfying. In an amazed tone, he told me, “Being at three hundred feet on air, I felt like I was hallucinating. It was really weird being underwater and all buzzed out.”

  Because both Rouses had experienced extreme narcosis at depth, they felt they could manage the nitrogen narcotic equivalent of the four-and-a-half-martini buzz they would encounter during this dive. What they did not take into account was the increased narcosis that their efforts in rough seas would bring on, and the effect this would have on their reactions to unforeseen problems. They had become too familiar with the underwater environment, too comfortable with its nuances, and too confident in their own excellent diving skills. Just the way I had only the year before. Our cave-diving instructor, Marc Eyring, always warned us that whenever complacency took hold in our diving careers, disaster was sure to follow. I had found out the hard way just how true that was, and now the lesson would be taught more severely to Chris and Chrissy.

  Narcosis would further distort Chrissy Rouse’s memory of the events on the dive. His postdive ranting, combined with John Chatterton’s video images, our familiarity with the Rouses, our knowledge of the underwater world, and the equipment analysis of their diving gear, allowed his friends to piece together the story of that foray into the U-Who. The series of problems the two men encountered is the stuff of abject terror. It is the diver’s worst nightmare—the last dive.

  New Jersey state trooper Steve McDougall had finished his dive and was decompressing alone on the Seeker’s anchor line when Chris and Chrissy Rouse entered the water and then descended past him, down the thick rope. McDougall, an instructor who had been diving for eighteen years, noted how smoothly and quickly the Rouses descended, like the confident, experienced divers they were. Chris and Chrissy tugged their way down the thick rope, which snaked through 230 feet of sea, its distant end tethered to the wreck of the U-boat below. The rope snapped violently as the dark-green waves slammed the dive boat. For the Rouses the water turned from green just below the surface to mourning black, as clear and cold as a moonless autumn sky.

  As the Rouses dropped farther down the line and away from him, McDougall saw their exhaled bubbles expand into silver oblongs, like flying saucers. To get his body safely back to surface pressure, he had to spend over an hour coming up slowly so that his body could eliminate the excess nitrogen it had absorbed during his dive. He knew that he would be seeing the Rouses again when they began their own lengthy decompression, which would start well before his deco was over.

  Topside, Seeker captain Dan Crowell turned to John Chatterton, the second captain on board the boat, and said, “I just checked the forecast on the radio again. The weather’s not looking good at all.”

  Chatterton nodded, looked quickly at the ocean, then replied, “I’ll go make sure everything’s secure.” Chatterton left and moved quickly around the boat, checking the equipment, making fast anything that was loose so that the boat would not get damaged and the divers on board would not get injured by debris tossing about on deck. Chatterton saw Steve Gatto and Tom Packer, both of whom were kneeling on the deck, bracing themselves for support as they hurried to finish putting away all of their equipment from the dive they had completed just before the Rouses had gone in the water. “Make sure everything’s real secure,” Chatterton reminded them. “We’re gonna get going back as soon as the Rouses are on board, and it won’t be a smooth trip.” Gatto and Packer nodded.

  Barb Lander, the only woman on board, reached into the boat’s large cooler, just outside the main cabin, and grabbed her fifth diet Coke since waking up four hours earlier. Seeing Chatterton, she said, “I’m set. All packed and ready!”

  “Let’s hope the Bicker Brothers cut their dive short,” Chatterton muttered.

  Below, hovering just above the U-boat, Chrissy would have been trying to focus on what had to get done: when he reached the wreck, unclip the two extra scuba tanks he carried, one at each side of his body, and lay the tanks down on the U-boat’s deck in such a way that they would not get swept over the side and drop into the sand. Then he would unclip his guideline from his harness while he swam toward the opening of the wreck.

  Chrissy had always swum faster than his father, and since Chrissy had led down the anchor line, the distance between the two men would have grown as Chrissy saw the U-boat and fixated on his mission, just as he had done only a month earlier when he dangerously swam ahead of his father to recover artifacts inside the notoriously treacherous ocean liner Empress of Ireland. With his father still lowering himself toward the sea bottom, Chrissy wouldn’t have bothered to wait but instead swam a short distance alongside the cigar-shaped vessel, his powerful dive light stabbing the water’s blackness with a spotlight beam that played along the curved steel hull.

  Particles of dirt and sand would have still been hanging suspended in the water from Steve McDougall’s foray into the warship. Chrissy would probably not have paid much attention to the fish, jellyfish, and translucent, primordial, otherworldly-looking matter that made the U-boat their home, nor would his nitrogen-clouded brain even have fully registered the creatures seemingly dancing in his dive light’s glare. Chrissy was so familiar with the underwater world that he would have immediately looked past the white, brown, and red living, breathing organisms—which resembled plant life and clung to the wreck’s side like dense foliage on a hillside rock garden—so that he could make out the contours of the wreck underneath. The experience he had gained in the course of over six hundred dives enabled him to propel himself efficiently and forcefully, without much effort. He knew even before the dive that he would need to be economical and precise if he was going to find that logbook, or anything historically significant, in the precious twenty-minute span of the dive he and his father had planned.

  The dive probably went well at first, and they should have reached the warship’s heart, the control room, within four minutes of beginning their descent. The control room was completely shattered, with sharp pieces of the hull protruding at odd angles from it. A gaping hole had been blasted in the U-boat as it sank, and its jagged metal mouth made it look like a strange deep-sea fish poised to swallow the unwary. Even though he had been here before, Chrissy would have verified where he was by turning to his left and seeing what resembled a large oval metal tube, six feet in diameter, lying in the sand alongside the hole in the control room. Having encountered all of this before, he must have recognized the conning tower, the sailors’ entry-way to and exit passage from the body of t
he boat, which had been blown right off the submarine. It was his landmark, indicating that the hole in the submarine to his right was where he planned to enter.

  Chris no doubt was breathing hard as he swam along the U-boat, trying to keep up with his son. Although the nitrogen buzz would have clouded his mind, he would have focused on getting into position outside the U-Who. They had planned that Chrissy would go inside and look for the logbook, while Chris would wait outside, in case Chrissy needed any assistance.

  Chrissy swam into the wreck. Although veteran wreck divers scoffed at the cave-diving technique of paying out a guideline to lead them back to open water when penetrating a wreck, the Rouses’ cave-diving training and their experiences on some of the most challenging wrecks in the world convinced them that the only sure way out of a wreck was to use a line. Chrissy would have nonchalantly tossed back to his father the brass clip attached to his guideline, just as he had done a month ago when they had gotten into a bitter argument after their dive about acceptable team protocol in using the guideline. The line would be Chrissy’s safety device inside the U-boat; it would guide him out of the wreckage in the zero visibility caused by the silt and sand that filled the bottom of the warship. When the particles billowed up during his dig for artifacts, he would be blinded.

  Chrissy probably did not bother to tie the line off to a piece of wreckage, as he should have done, because that would have only taken up precious time that could be used to look for the U-boat captain’s logbook. The young diver always knew that his father was there to back him up, and in his haste to gather artifacts, Chrissy would cut corners, which infuriated his father. Even before the dive, John Chatterton, who was credited with the discovery of this wreck, had warned Chrissy against being overzealous in his quest for the logbook. In fact, Chatterton had tried to dissuade Chrissy from the ambitious dive, seeing in the younger man an artifact fixation that could only spell disaster, just as it had with other overly fixated divers in the past.