Submerged

by Thomas F Monteleone

  “You see my light yet?” Dex undulated the torch slowly.

  “Just barely,” said Mike. “But it’s getting brighter all the time.”

  Dex floated in the dim water. Despite the inherent perils, he loved it down there, plain and simple. There was no way to explain the unique perspective diving gave you, the sensation of being in a world that existed solely for yourself.

  And it was pretty damned cloudy down there. Not much ambient light once you got below more than about 10 feet. Without a light, depending on what was floating around in the water, it could be as dark as a mineshaft at midnight. Some guys couldn’t handle that kind of darkness when combined with the water pressure and the knowledge that the air and the light was so far above you. Some guys even lost the feel for what was above you. Directional sense shot all to hell. The darkness and the pressure was just a natural force of disorientation, and some people would go crazy if they had to stay down for the length of your average dive.

  But it had never bothered Dex. He’d always felt at home down there—a place where you were totally alone with your thoughts. Even though, sometimes, those thoughts could gang up on you. Overwhelm you if you weren’t careful.

  Like going to the bottom of the Styx, and being swallowed up by a never-ending night where dreams died with everything else. Held in the pressurized grip of the ocean, you could feel more horribly alone than anywhere else on the planet.

  Hey, he thought as he shook his head. Back to the present, pal.

  Pay attention to what you’re doing—this current dive would not be anywhere near as deep as some of the other wrecks they’d dove. Stay alive and useful to the rest of the team. Even though it was still early in the season, two weeks before Memorial Day, there’d been a whiplash of warm current surging up the Bay from a temporary coastal sway of the Gulfstream.

  Visibility was another story, though. In a word, it was shitty. Even down in the Lower Bay, which got more of the Atlantic waters to keep it clean. Dex had known the waters of the Chesapeake had been getting ever cloudier for twenty years. If you were going to chart it out, it was on an inverse slope with the diminishing oyster population. More oysters; cleaner Bay.

  So far, Dex wasn’t able to see much of anything that might be lying beneath him, but he knew he had to be patient. His dive-mate on this first dive of the day was Mike Bielski, and he could just barely see Mike’s torchlight stabbing through the murky water—even though he was barely fifteen feet from the other man. And this was one of the best seasons for visibility in the bay, when most of the floating algae had died off.

  But today, Dex wasn’t all that concerned with how well he could see down here because they wouldn’t be just swimming around, looking at random for whatever might be littering the bottom. Using his Navy surplus gear, Kevin Cheever had given them some hard data in the form of LORAN coordinates, and they were going to be trying to home-in, for the first time, on the site of a new wreck.

  A wreck so far unknown and unidentified—until Kevin had stumbled on the data that suggested something interesting might be down there.

  “I see you,” Mike’s voice filled Dex’s earphone. “I see the safeline.”

  “Okay, grab on.” Dex watched his dive-mate grasp the nylon line running from the Sea Dog straight down to the bottom in the center of the LORAN grid. Most divers didn’t bother to hook a sliding piton and tether from the safeline to their toolbelt, which would keep them on course to the target—unless the visibility was practically zero. As long as you could see the line, most divers preferred to be unfettered, and Mike was no exception.

  Bielski was a tall stringbean of a guy. At an age when most guys were losing the battle of extra poundage around the middle, Mike seemed to getting leaner. He ate his share of Doritos and burgers and Budweisers along with the rest of them, but never gained the weight. And it wasn’t a life of training and exercise doing it, either. Other than the excursions with the dive club, Mike sat on his ass working math theorems at Johns Hopkins University.

  “Ready,” said Mike, pointing downward with his thumb like an emperor giving his opinion on a fallen gladiator.

  “Okay, let’s take a look…”

  “Donnie, you still on our channel?”

  “I got you. Base unit’s loud and clear,” he said. “Good luck, guys.”

  “Kevin says we’re not going to need it. Like fish in a barrel,” said Dex.

  “Okay, then just be careful,” said Donnie. “I’ll be monitoring everything.”

  “Gotcha. Here we go…”

  Dex angled his body toward the bottom and flipper-kicked. Keeping the white nylon in his torchlight, it was easy for Dex to head down to the bottom. Every once in a while he would check his Ikelite depth gauge, more out of habit than anything else, although they were getting close to a critical threshold where nitrogen narcosis became a concern. They were in a section of the Chesapeake just south of the Bay Bridge where it was never more than 70 to 90 feet deep.

  He had no idea what he was looking for—other than it was some kind of wreck, fairly big at around 400 feet long and pretty much intact. He and his pals had been wreck-diving for years, but they’d never found their “own”—a new ship, one never previously discovered, charted and picked clean of anything worth salvaging.

  And that was nothing unusual, Dex knew, because it was nearly impossible to just be swimming around in the murky depths of the Chesapeake and just stumble on a big boat sticking up out of the seabed. It just didn’t happen. Odds were against it—you being so small and the sea bottom being so big.

  But new technology trickling down to the consumer markets would be changing all that within the next decade. Dex had seen big changes in dive gear just within the last five years with GPS, underwater communications and wearable decompression computers; and it was going to keep getting more interesting.

  “Forty feet,” Bielski’s voice piped through Dex’s headset. “I don’t see a thing yet.”

  “Be careful,” said Dex. “If there’s any superstructure, it could be showing up any time now.”

  From the images Kevin had given them, there was no way to tell if the sunken ship was lying on its side or had settled to the bottom in a “sitting-up” position with its stacks, bridge, masts (or whatever it had) all pointing up at the surface. An unsuspecting diver could swim right down into a tangle of netting, cables, or other jutting debris that could be deadly.

  Of course, it would help to know what kind of wreck they were homing in on. The Chesapeake Bay was littered with the broken hulls of ships from the past two hundred years. Lots of wooden ships went down during the Civil War and years afterward from the capricious storms that whip up the coast from the Carolinas. But the wood eventually rots away and all that’s left are the canons and the metal fittings.

  So, from the signature of the sonar scans Dex had seen, they were most likely headed toward a steel ship. Its lines were too well-defined for it to be all that much broken up.

  “Hey…” said Mike Bielski. “I think I see something…off to the right. Easy…”

  Peering through the dark water, Dex panned his torch back and forth, stirring up all the floating particulate in the water. Even with the algae at its lowest point, it was still hard to see very far. “What’s it look like?”

  Mike eased to a stop next to Dex, reached out and held onto the safeline. Even though only ten feet separated them, Dex could only see his black and orange drysuit dimly. Like swimming in pea soup.

  “Just saw it for a second,” said Mike. “A mast or an antenna. Seems like it oughta be right below us. Careful we don’t get poked in the ass.”

  “Okay, let’s just inch it…”

  Hand over hand, Dex began to pull himself toward the bottom. Mike was only slightly above and off his right shoulder. He and Mike played their torchlights slowly through the murk below them. Had to be real careful now in case there
was anything that could snag or tangle them. Dex had survived a few incidents like that; every time he’d thought he might die, and every time it was enough to make him wonder—did he really wanted to keep diving?

  But that was before Jana walked out on him. For a while after that disaster, he knew he didn’t give a good Goddamn.

  Funny, when he was down here like this, the “air world” (as an old Navy diver had referred to it years ago) seemed so far away, so alien, and almost unremembered. It was as if none of what went on up there had ever actually happened. As if the ex-wife had never even been a part of his life.

  “Whoa!” said Mike, his voice knifing through the silence. “Watch it!”

  Dex blinked, and was stunned to see a large shaft jutting up in front of his mask. Tubular, metallic, encrusted with the bodies and exoskeletons of marine life, it represented the topmost part of whatever ship they’d found.

  “Hey, guys…everything okay down there?” Don Jordan’s voice crackled in Dex’s earphones. He hadn’t been keeping the guys back in the boat in the loop, and he couldn’t blame them for getting itchy. “Yeah, we just reached some superstructure—the boat’s obviously sitting upright. Depth: fifty-two feet at the topmast. Tell Kev he couldn’t have been any more on the money unless we were in his bathtub.”

  There was a pause from Don, then: “He says there’s no way you’re ever gonna be there!”

  “Okay,” said Dex. “We’re going to take it real slow now. Let’s see what we’re looking at. Looks like we’re going to be just below three atmospheres…”

  He signaled to Mike and they began working their way past the mast-like extension. Whatever it was attached to, below them, was still mostly invisible beyond the limited wash of their torches in the soupy water. But they hadn’t eased down much farther before they encountered a second heavily encrusted extension, and then several others. There was a grouping of steel tubes and shafts, and one of them looked familiar.

  “You see that?” he said to Mike, pointing at the long thick extension.

  “I see it—is it what I think it is?”

  Holding up his index finger to pause, then touching his Divelink phone, Dex spoke softly. “Kev, you still got us?”

  “Oh yeah…what gives?”

  “We’re a little farther down, looks like we have a sub…”

  Chapter Three

  Bruckner

  At Sea

  April 28, 1945

  The air temperature felt as if it dropped ten degrees in as many seconds. Despite his desire to be topside as much as possible, it was simply too damned cold. Adjusting his cap, Erich turned toward the ladder and nudged Manny. “Come, my friend, let us get some coffee.”

  They descended the ladder to the control deck in the conning tower, which was considerably larger than the Type VII boats with which Erich had been so familiar. He approached the tiny console where funkmeister and Electrical Officer Leutnant Newton Bischoff hunched over a rack of instruments. Bischoff supervised the workings of all communications and detection gear, and would have been simply called a radioman in years past. The U-5001 had been equipped with a new, top-secret device that vastly improved their ability to discover if their position was being swept by radar. A bristling mast taller than the schnorkel and the periscope, it had been nicknamed “the Eye,” and was far more efficient than the old “Biscay Cross” the U-boats had been using in the earlier years of the war. Erich remembered how cumbersome the Cross had been, and how the enemy had soon learned to use the instrument as a reflective homing beacon, which had ironically made the surfaced U-boats even easier targets to find and destroy.

  Newton Bischoff stood at the sight of his captain, despite the relaxed protocol undersea. Erich did not care for Bischoff personally because he’d swallowed the National Socialist Party’s philosophies so completely, but he had been the best available electronics man.

  “Everything in order, Leutnant?” said Erich.

  “Working perfectly. We are entering a very hot part of the grid,” said Bischoff. “I will be ready.”

  Erich nodded. “I know you will.”

  Turning back to join Fassbaden, Erich reflected on what Bischoff had emphasized. The allies had begun patrolling the mouth of the Skagerrak with impunity, as if daring the U-boat flotillas to attack the korvettes and destroyers. And all along the coast of Norway, it was becoming increasingly difficult to break through the blockades and into the deeper ocean waters. The allies had completely turned the tables on the U-boats over the last three years. Somehow, they had topped every new weapon, tactic, and technological development.

  But even the enemy’s finest minds could not have imagined something so formidable as the U-5001.

  As Erich moved aft toward the galley, Fassbaden close behind, the sturdy thrum of the big diesels sounded powerful and reassuring to him. It meant his boat was healthy and strong, knifing through the increasingly frigid waters of the northern open sea.

  Entering the galley, Erich could not help but note again how everything still looked so new, so unused. The stainless steel, the painted bulkheads and hatches, the stoves and ovens, the floors—all unscratched, unstained or unblemished.

  “This place looks too clean,” he said with a smile. “But I have a feeling we will be doing plenty to fix that quite soon.”

  Fassbaden poured two mugs of coffee and slid one to Erich. Hot and full of sleep-depriving caffeine, it was just what he needed. How nice it would be to have a sweet linzertort to go along with it, he thought wistfully. It would be a long time before he had a chance to sample the favorite pastry of his youth. Perhaps never again…

  And in some ways—some very important ways, Erich did not really care.

  His main reason for ardently wishing to return home to his native Frankfurt had been torn from his life in a terror-filled night of Brit bombers. In the autumn of 1944, during one of the clockwork-like raids of Lancasters over the city, a stray 500-pounder had pulverized the home of his in-laws, who had made the fatal mistake of inviting their oldest daughter, Frieda, to dinner. Frieda had been Erich’s wife of only two years. From what he’d been able to learn, the house had taken a direct hit, and no one inside the structure could have felt a thing. Death had been instantaneous, and in that, Erich had grasped for something of comfort. His wife had not suffered, and in war, that kind of death was indeed a gift.

  It had been hard to continue at first. He’d been tortured by waves of conflicting emotions for months. Guilt that he and his fellow kriegsmariners had failed to sink enough of the freighters bringing so many bombs and planes and supplies from that bottomless storehouse of America. If only the U-boat war had been more successful, maybe Frieda would still be alive.

  How many times had he proposed that argument to himself? The temptation might surface to blame oneself, but he never did. How many times had he actually blamed himself?

  Blame was a funny thing.

  Erich had spent months contemplating the series of events and connections between them. His education in the Frankfurt Military Academy for Boys had required he be a well-read young man, and he had learned much from the scientists and the philosophers. But all the Kant and Schopenhauer and Bacon could not dull his pain, or his Nietzchian need for a powerful retribution at any cost.

  But the question lingered: retribution against whom?

  Although he would never admit his conclusion to anyone other than his closet friend, Manny Fassbaden, Erich blamed his own country, or more specifically its psychotic government, for killing his wife.

  He knew he was not alone among career military men in feeling like that, just as he knew he must keep silent his opinion or risk hanging for treason.

  His country had not given him a reason to live or even fight. When they assigned him the U-5001 mission, he willingly accepted the orders—as much because his fellow officers deemed it a suicide mission as anything else. />
  “…and I suspect you have not been listening to me, Captain,” said Manfred Fassbaden with a grin.

  The words pulled Erich from the depths of his thoughts, and he realized he’d been far, far away from the U-5001. “I am sorry…what were you saying, Manny? I was ‘woolgathering’…thinking about something else…”

  His Exec smiled, lowered his gaze. He was a big man trying to look smaller. “What I was saying was just something to pass the time. It was nothing.”

  “I was thinking of things past. And how so many of us wish we could live in it,” said Erich. “But, I am beginning to believe it is not even a good idea to visit there.”

  Fassbaden clapped him lightly on the shoulder. “War is a time of history. It reeks of the past. It is unavoidable.”

  Erich understood what his friend was trying to say, but right now, it was not working. “I am uncertain how to put my feelings into words sometimes,” he said. “But…but I have this conviction…that this is my last cruise.”

  “That sounds dire,” said Fassbaden.

  “Not really. This war is nearing its end. If we win or lose, it will be decided in this year, I am certain. But regardless, the mission of this boat will end it—for me. Either we will succeed, or we won’t. And I don’t mind telling you how weary I am of all this mess. So tired of all the long, dead hours under the sea, all the inventing of ways to pass those hours. I am tired of the heroic speeches to my crews and the required reminders of what a great nation we’ve always been. All the inspiring history lessons I have delivered—I feel like I should have a professorship!”

  Fassbaden grinned. He understood perfectly. Morale on the U-boats was a fragile, ephemeral thing. Without it, Erich knew, your crew consigned everyone to the bottom.

  He drank deeply from his mug, placed it on the table, looked at his Executive Officer. “Sometimes I wonder if such thoughts will impair my duties.”

  Fassbaden gave a suggestion of standing at attention by straightening his spine for an instant. A subtle display of respect. “You have always been the finest leader I have ever served under. That is the simple truth. It is an honor to trust my life to your decisions.”