The Last Dive

by Bernie Chowdhury

  “No, I’m not crazy,” said Chatterton calmly. “I’m a professional diver, I work underwater for a living and have for years, which actually might mean I’m crazy. But as far as my plan goes, yes, it’s dangerous. If it were easy, everyone would be able to do it and we’d have solved this thing long ago.” He had thought out the dive meticulously, he told the producer. He would proceed one step at a time, with backup divers he trusted. “It’ll take several attempts to complete this thing. You still interested?” he asked.

  Reassured by Chatterton’s reasoned explanation, the television outfit put up the funds to get the dive team to the U-Who again, with no guarantee of success. As Chatterton has always said, “A legitimate adventure has no predetermined outcome. It’s not like going to Disney World.” Chatterton’s experience on the U-Who was anything but Disneyesque.

  Descending to the U-Who to test his plan, Chatterton wore only a single tank on his back, with a second tank clipped at his side in the cave-diving style that by now all technical divers had adopted. Richie Kohler accompanied Chatterton and would act as the safety diver, just as Chris Rouse had been for his son. Since Chatterton and Kohler would be heading aft, they went inside the wreck at the opposite end of the same opening that Chrissy Rouse had entered on his last dive.

  When they got to the hatchway, Chatterton took off his side-mounted tank and laid it on the floor. Then, he took off the jacket-style harness that held his other tank in place on his back. He pushed the jacket harness and tank first through the hatchway, and then over the beam, tethered by his breathing hose to his life-giving gas bottle and swimming behind it. Once he was on the other side of the beam, Chatterton put the jacket harness and tank back on, and swam into the electric motor room. He assessed the area briefly, then repeated the procedure as he exited the compartment. Kohler, who was waiting outside the diesel motor room, was relieved when Chatterton’s light flickered into view. The two exited the wreck and swam up the anchor line toward the surface. When they got back on the boat a few hours later, everyone was excited that Chatterton was able to safely get in and get out of the compartment using his radical approach. Kohler and Chatterton made plans to go back and shoot some video footage inside the electric motor room before they disturbed anything looking for the precious tag that would identify this boat.

  Their next dive went well—at first. Chatterton got inside the diesel motor room and put his single tank back on. But when Kohler pushed the bulky video unit over the beam, Chatterton could not reach it. His body was wedged against the debris inside the compartment and his tank was jammed against the ceiling. Then, disaster struck. A steel beam collapsed on top of Chatterton, spinning him around so that his tank was pinned to the floor.

  The beam came to rest on Chatterton’s chest. He was 230 feet underwater, pinned just as Chrissy Rouse had been. Fortunately, unlike Chrissy Rouse, he was faceup, and clearer-headed than Chrissy had been because of the trimix gas Chatterton breathed.

  Chatterton looked at his bottom timer. He knew that Richie Kohler, wearing back-mounted double tanks, would not be able to come in and get him out of the wreck the way Chris Rouse was able to do with his son. With only a single tank of breathing gas, he would have to act quickly to save himself. He tried pushing the beam up with his hands. It moved, but it was so long that its far end got snared among other debris. Chatterton was still trapped. He tried wiggling the beam to one side, but that did not work either. His exertions caused him to breathe the lightweight helium gas faster.

  In all of his diving experience, John Chatterton had never before been in such dire circumstances. His only hope was to wriggle out of the jacket harness that held his tank in place, then squeeze his body from under the beam, and finally pull his tank free. If he could not pull his tank free, he would have to hold his breath and swim the thirty feet without it toward Kohler, who would provide him with breathing gas from his tanks.

  Had he pushed beyond reasonable limits? In his obsessive desire to positively identify the U-boat, was he tempting fate? Had the persistent curiosity and encouragement he encountered from others, including the TV producers, clouded his judgment about what he could accomplish underwater? So close to finding that identifying tag, and so close to death, Chatterton faced either a crossroads or an abyss.

  Chatterton unhooked the jacket-style harness that held his scuba tank in place. He contorted his body like Houdini escaping from the bonds of chains that held him confined in a water-filled box. Chatterton’s struggles eliminated all visibility and he worked by feel alone, squeezing his body out from under the steel beam above him and his jacket harness and tank below him. When his body was out from under the beam he could feel himself being pulled upward by the gas in his drysuit, which now was not counteracted by the weight of his scuba tank. Chatterton had to hold on to the beam so that he did not shoot toward the U-boat compartment’s ceiling and lose his tenuous mouth grip on his regulator. Chatterton pulled himself down so that his body was next to the steel beam and then he yanked at the harness and tank, liberating them both from underneath the wreckage. He grabbed the tank, pushed it in front of him, and squirmed over the debris that had made it so difficult to enter this area in the first place. Shaken from his ordeal, he exited the wreck with Kohler. During his two-hour decompression, Chatterton wondered whether the U-Who would ever give up its secret.

  On their next dive, Chatterton and Kohler would be assisted by Pat Rooney, a highly skilled, experienced wreck diver with—like Kohler—a reputation for near fearlessness. Chatterton shot some video after manhandling the bulky camera unit past the obstructions. Back on the surface, he reviewed the video to make sure he knew exactly where to go to retrieve the parts boxes. Then, he descended again, moving determinedly through the wreck, sliding past the now-familiar obstructions until he got inside the electric motor room and proceeded to the parts boxes. Incredibly, he faced yet another obstacle: A steel pipe had fallen on the stack of boxes, and when he tried to move the pipe, the encrustation held it tightly in place. He could not move the pipe, or get to the parts boxes that would, he hoped, contain a tag with the U-boat’s identifying number. He cursed into his regulator, bitterly frustrated. He knew he would have to bring tools down with him on yet another dive.

  The next time Chatterton entered the electric motor room, he carried a heavy hammer, which divers call either a mallet or a lump hammer, depending on whether you are from America or another country. He swung the tool like Thor, his boyish frustration removing any caution left within the professional diver. The hammer blow was very nearly Chatterton’s last act in this world: As the silt fell away, Chatterton saw he was hammering not at a pipe but at a pressurized aluminum oxygen container from an escape lung designed to let sailors swim out of a sunken submarine. Chatterton froze.

  He knew well what he was looking at and how lethal it could be. He had recovered one of these containers from the U-Who on a previous expedition because he knew it should have a sailor’s name engraved on it. But when he took it to the surface and cleaned it off, he was disappointed to find that it bore no name. He put the bottle on a shelf in his garage. When he came back to it several days later, he found only twisted metal and mangled shelving—the oxygen bottle had exploded.

  Chatterton now hovered carefully next to the stack of boxes pinned down by the oxygen cylinder. With the mallet in his hand he considered what he should do. Another blow could cause the oxygen cylinder to explode. If that happened, Chatterton would probably be killed outright from either the percussion waves that would burst his stomach, lungs, and intestines or from the debris that was sure to rain down on him. Yet he had come too far and risked his life too often in this quest not to take another chance.

  With faith that the German-engineered cylinder would maintain its integrity, Chatterton whacked away a second time.

  He was lucky. The encrustation holding the oxygen bottle affixed to the boxes fell away, and Chatterton brushed the time-bomb aside. Grabbing the top box, Chatterton muscled it to
ward Kohler and Rooney, who waited on the other side of the steel beam, just inside the diesel engine room. Rooney grabbed the box and forced it out of the wreck, where he attached a lift bag to it and then sent it to the surface. In the meantime, Chatterton went back for a second box, which he removed and shoved toward Kohler, who took the prize out of the vessel. With no visibility inside the electric motor room, and little time left, Chatterton exited the U-boat for what he hoped was the last time. He gave a quick respectful nod to the maw of wreckage that marked the destination of Chris and Chrissy Rouse’s last dive.

  On the surface, the dive team opened the parts boxes and found what they were looking for: a tag bearing the U-boat’s identifying number: U-869. It was August 31, 1997. They had solved the mystery one day short of six years after the wreck’s discovery, four years and ten months after Chris and Chrissy Rouse had been entrapped only two rusted compartment walls from the grail they sought. The television camera dutifully recorded the relief and elation each man felt.

  The big question now was: Why was the U-869 recorded as having been sunk on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean? Chatterton has given the explanation so many times during interviews for the media and at diving club meetings and conferences that he speaks as if he were reading from a script:

  “During the war, the Allies picked up and decoded the radio message from U-boat headquarters ordering U-869 to change its original patrol station from the U.S. East Coast to the African coast. The Allies knew from their radio direction finding and previous messages from the U-boat that U-869 was in the mid-Atlantic. But records show that U-869 never acknowledged the order to change its patrol area. They continued to the U.S. coast as originally ordered. When U-boat headquarters received no more radio transmissions from U-869, it was written off as missing, with its final location probably anywhere from the mid-Atlantic to the African coast. At war’s end, the Allies assigned a British officer to make a final determination of each U-boat’s fate so that the Allies could be sure there were none in hiding. That officer determined from the battle reports of U.S.S. Fowler and F.R. L’Indiscret that their probable kill of a U-boat must have been from their encounter with U-869; the status was upgraded from probable kill to confirmed kill, and entered into the archives and history books as such.”

  If the U-869 was not destroyed by the U.S.S. Fowler and F.R. L’Indiscret, how was it sunk? The answer lies in the torpedo head found next to the U-869’s mutilated control room, close to the area where Chrissy was nearly crushed. The serial number on the torpedo head revealed it to be a German T-5 acoustical torpedo, designed to home in on the noise of the target vessel’s engine room. According to German naval records, at least 30 percent of German torpedoes early in the war were either duds or detonated at the wrong time and place, which made U-boat attacks a dicey business for commanders and crew. The German U-boat command knew in late 1943 that a T-5 torpedo could malfunction when fired, and come back to destroy its own U-boat. J. P. Mallmann Showell, the author of U-boats Under the Swastika, speculates that the U-377 and the U-972 were destroyed by their own T-5 torpedoes. Probably the U-869 fired one of its T-5 torpedoes but it homed in on the noise from the U-boat’s own control room, made a circular run, and destroyed the vessel, killing its entire crew instantly.

  Solving the mystery of the U-869 had claimed three divers’ lives, including our friends Chris and Chrissy Rouse, and had nearly claimed Chatterton’s life. He knew on his last dive to the U-boat that he had pushed his luck and skills to the very edge; if one other thing had gone wrong, he would most likely have died. A thin line divided the outcome of his effort from that of the Rouses’ fatal dive. Some people would view that line as the filament of pure chance. Others would distinguish Chatterton’s survival and success from the fatal failure of father and son by declaring the Rouses’ deaths to be a result of their choice not to dive on mixed gas. They could not afford the clarity of mind that had saved Chatterton, but they could not afford to be without it, either.

  The U-boat changed Chatterton’s life. He had known from his combat experience in Vietnam that an individual’s façade is stripped away by the razor’s edge of imminent death; how the person deals with that edge reveals who he really is. Chatterton decided he could not turn away from the potentially deadly challenge of solving the U-Who mystery. “The greatest risk I took in diving the U-boat was the risk of failure,” he says. “I did not have to dive the U-boat, or spend about forty thousand dollars of my own money trying to solve the mystery. I could have just walked away from it. Other people kept saying, ‘Probably somebody who is just diving the wreck for the first time will pick up something in the sand that will identify it.’ I was amazed—it was as if they expected me to do nothing to try and identify it, and wait until somebody happened along and solved the mystery out of pure chance. It just showed me how good people can be at putting up barriers, making excuses not to do something instead of expending their energy on solving the problem in front of them. I made a very conscious choice that I was going to do everything I could to identify the wreck.”

  After he had solved the U-Who mystery, Chatterton knew he had reached the pinnacle of his wreck-diving career. He had to stop. “The circumstances, the intensity of effort and how long it took to solve—that sort of opportunity will never come along again for me. And I don’t want it to. I’ve learned what I could from it, and now I’ve turned more introspective, and I hope to apply the lessons learned on the U-boat quest to other areas of my life.” Although he still works as a commercial diver and is now a supervisor, coordinating pier and harbor repair and dredging and salvage projects from the surface, he has given up technical diving and life at sport diving’s edge. He still enjoys introducing others to the thrill and wonder of the underwater world and still teaches recreational diving, but says he has no further desire to engage in the level of diving intensity that he experienced during his years diving the mystery U-boat. But I wonder how long Chatterton can resist the call of the deep.

  Chatterton’s diving expeditions and his research forays led to frequent absences from his wife, who spent her time involved in the equestrian world. The two were divorced. Chatterton has found a new love in his life, an adventurous woman who is a nondiver, and who knows little about Chatterton’s diving past—“She doesn’t know and I don’t dwell on it,” says Chatterton. “I’ve moved on.”

  Chris and Chrissy’s deaths focused Sue. Their deaths had shown her how short life could be and how necessary it is to make the most of it. She hated her job as an insurance saleswoman, and she decided to quit. At first she contemplated going back to college full-time. Although she had taken college courses at night, she had never completed her degree, even though she felt that graduation from college would be a notable achievement. Yet there was another, more immediate plan she could follow. Ever since they all became involved in cave diving, she, Chris, and Chrissy had always aimed to move to Florida together and make diving their livelihood. Their intention was to make the move to the Ginnie Springs area in 1993. Not only was it convenient to the cave diving they all loved so much, but the land and house prices were low compared to those in Pennsylvania. Chrissy had felt that it was far more realistic for him to eventually be able to buy a house near Ginnie Springs than in the northeastern United States. Sue resolved to continue to work toward the family dream, even if Chris and Chrissy were not standing next to her to share it.

  Rather than returning to college, Sue became a diving instructor. She had always enjoyed assisting with classes and helping students who were having the greatest difficulty learning to dive. She felt that her own training had been inadequate, and she wanted to help others avoid the discomfort she had felt so that they could truly enjoy the sport. In partnership with another diving instructor she had known for many years, Sue opened the Blue Abyss dive shop in northern New Jersey. Although she wasn’t in Florida with Chris and Chrissy as they had planned, she was making a go of a diving livelihood.

  Yet even as she began to
build a new life, Sue remained haunted by questions as to why Chrissy had died in the hyperbaric chamber. She spoke to Dr. Bill Hamilton about her son’s treatment, and then tried to contact Glenn Butler, who had operated the chamber. She was not successful in getting through to Butler, and he did not return her calls, which struck her as odd. (Butler says he was not aware that Sue was trying to contact him.) Equally peculiar, she received no medical bill at all for the treatment given to Chris and Chrissy; although her husband had medical insurance, Chrissy did not. Six months after their deaths, Sue requested the hospital records of the incident. When she had no success obtaining the files, she contacted a lawyer. But the lawyer she spoke to was interested in making money by bringing a lawsuit against everyone involved in the accident. “I just want to know what happened,” Sue told the lawyer. “I don’t want to sue anybody.” With no big money in it for him, the lawyer lost interest. She contacted other lawyers, who also didn’t want to represent her if she didn’t plan to litigate. Although she was able to get the Coast Guard reports and the autopsy reports, the hospital records of her son’s treatment were elusive. Apparently, they had disappeared, along with the clothing that her husband wore when he was admitted to the emergency room. She never brought a lawsuit against anyone involved.

  Although it was painful for her to think about another intimate relationship, she eventually grew closer to a man who had worked at Underwater World, where Chris and Chrissy had been certified and where Chrissy had eventually been employed. Sue had known Scott Kee for years, and their friendship blossomed into a romance. In 1997, Scott moved into the house Sue had built with Chris and Chrissy. A year later, Sue sold the house, and she moved to Florida with Scott to begin a new life. They have a beautiful waterfront house, which Scott uses as the home base for his electronic engineering consulting business, specializing in satellite navigation.