"Shadow Divers"

[fiefoe]

Besides all the history detective stuff, this is a very well-done psychological study of people who are so devoted to this really dangerous sport, wreck diving. Robert Kurson found various good verbs for what nitrogen narcosis does to a person.

• This is where the hangers-on and wannabes and also-rans and once-greats keep believing in the sea. In Brielle, when the customers leave, the town’s lines show, and they are the kind grooved by the thin difference between making a living on the water and washing out.
• They saw stories in the Modiglianied faces of broken ships, frozen moments in a nation’s hopes or a captain’s dying instinct or a child’s potential, and they experienced these scenes unbuffered by curators or commentators or historians, shoulder to shoulder with life as it existed at the moment it had most mattered.
• The Atlantic floor was still a wilderness in Nagle’s prime, and it demanded of its explorers the same grit that the American West did of its pioneers... The sport eagerly shook out its dabblers and sightseers; those who remained seemed of a different species. They were physical in their world orientation and sudden in their appetites.
• The whistle was majestic, but the most beautiful part of the discovery was that underwater it looked like a worthless pipe. Floating amid the wreckage, Nagle used his mind’s eye to watch the ship break and sink. He knew the ship’s anatomy, and as he imagined it coming apart he could see the whistle settle, right where that seemingly worthless piece of pipe lay.
• So Nagle, who had saved a good bit of money from his Snap-On Tools days, decided to buy a dive boat himself, a vessel constructed from his imagination for a single purpose: to salvage the Doria’s bell.
• His drinking worsened. During one charter, Nagle unilaterally decided to reroute to a more challenging wreck, a site that had captured his imagination and begged to be explored.
• To fishermen, shipwrecks mean life. A mass of steel and wood that might have buried human souls becomes a rapid city of marine biology along the ocean floor. Shipwrecks are where the food chain poses for a snapshot.
• By day, Chatterton worked underwater construction jobs around Manhattan, the kind that required a brass helmet and a ten-thousand-degree Broco torch. By weekend, he masterminded some of the most inventive and daring shipwreck dives ever executed on the eastern seaboard. When Nagle looked in Chatterton’s eyes, he saw his own best days staring back at him.
• The Doria’s hugeness overwhelmed him; a diver could spend a decade of twenty-five-minute dives on this wreck and never see it all. Again he returned, and marveled at the feeling of being inside places that didn’t used to be places, of becoming present in this vast repository of tiny things that had meant something to people.
• Most likely it was an old garbage barge; in years past, municipalities had stuffed geriatric schooners with trash, cut their masts, and sunk them at no place in particular.
• In the United States, of the ten million certified scuba divers, it is likely that only a few hundred dive deep for shipwrecks. To those few, it is not a matter of if they will taste death, only of whether they’ll swallow... Deep-shipwreck diving is unusual in another respect. Because it confronts man’s most primordial instincts—to breathe; to see; to flee from danger—the layperson need not strap on the equipment in order to appreciate the peril. He need only contemplate the sport’s dangers. They are his dangers, too, and in learning about them he will begin to comprehend the deep-wreck diver and feel his stories.
• If the diver ascends slowly, atmospheric pressure decreases gradually and the accumulated nitrogen passes out of his body tissues in the form of microscopic bubbles... Only when nitrogen bubbles are microscopically small inside a diver can they travel efficiently through his bloodstream and back to his lungs, where they can be discharged through normal respiration. This is what a diver wants.
• Equipment is the deep-wreck diver’s soul mate. It grants him passage into an off-limits world, then stands between him and nature. There are hints of love in the way the diver clips, wraps, fastens, and jury-rigs his 175 pounds of gear until he is part modern art sculpture, part 1950s movie alien. Fully suited, he can only lumber, but the rig feels like life to him.
• This precise dropping of the anchor line is critical business. The anchor line does not simply keep the boat stationary. It is the diver’s umbilical cord, the means by which he makes his way to the shipwreck, and more important, finds his way back.
• Neon colors do not exist for him; greenhorns who choose those hues don’t have to wait long before hearing the boat’s opinion on such loudness. When he is fully geared up, a good wreck diver looks like a German car engine; more ordinary divers resemble the interior of a child’s toy chest.
• Panicked divers have slashed with knives at would-be rescuers, torn regulators from their mouths, and dragged them to the surface without decompressing in a mad dash to reach the surface. <> Even the act of observing another diver in distress can be dangerous while deep in the ocean. A diver’s emotions at 200 feet are already in hyperdrive from narcosis... The good ones, however, never rely on each other for safety. Their philosophy is one of coldly resolved independence and self-rescue.
• Shipwreck interiors can be terrifying places, collections of spaces in which order has fractured and linearity bent until human beings no longer fit. Hallways dead-end in the middle. Fallen ceilings block stairways... Inside the wreck, where chaos is architect, dangers come camouflaged in every crevice. Bad happens suddenly.
• He must remember everything—every twist, turn, rise, and fall—and he must do so in an environment of few obvious landmarks and where most everything is sweatered in sea anemones. Should his command of navigation slip, should his memory falter, even for a moment, he will begin to ask questions: Did I swim through...
• The diver’s bubbles do not help. Exhaust from his respiration rises and unsettles overhead silt and rust. Simply by breathing, he has invoked a rainstorm of rust flakes, some as large as peas, many as small as sugar crystals. The bubbles also disturb oil that has invariably leaked from tanks and equipment and spread everywhere in the wreck, and they disperse that oil into a haze and onto the diver’s mask and into his mouth.
• Navigation and visibility issues make for a full mental plate. But the diver must contend with another danger inside a wreck, this one perhaps nastier than any other... Once tangled, the diver becomes a marionette. If he struggles, he can mummy himself in the stuff. In bad visibility, it is nearly impossible to avoid these nests; there is not an experienced wreck diver who has not become entangled—often.
• But in a shipwreck, where every danger is first cousin to every other, a diver’s desperation makes an open house of his bad situation.
• but Drozd, knife still in hand, slashed wildly at the man, his mind spraying in a million directions, his narcosis pummeling. And then Drozd turned and swam down the wreck, a full tank of air on his back, no regulator in his mouth, still slashing, still cutting the ocean to shreds, and he kept swimming until he disappeared into the blackness of the wreck, and he never came out.
• A great diver learns to stand down his emotions. At the moment he becomes lost or blinded or tangled or trapped, that instant when millions of years of evolution demand fight or flight and narcosis carves order from his brain, he dials down his fear and contracts into the moment until his breathing slows and his narcosis lightens and his reason returns. In this way he overcomes his humanness and becomes something else. In this way, liberated from instincts, he becomes a freak of nature. <> To arrive at such a state, the diver must know the creases and folds of dread, so that when it leaps on him inside a wreck he is dealing with an old friend.
• a passenger did not dare lay naked skin against the gymnasium-issue blue pads that passed for mattresses on the Seeker. There are romantic smells at sea, but a cushion kippered by years of sweaty, salt-watered divers is not among them.
• he landed on a mass of metal near the sand. White particulate matter flew horizontally past his eyes in the swirling, dark green water, a sideways white Christmas in September... With every foot he moved forward, a new snapshot emerged under the interrogation of his headlight, leaving the previous scene fading to black; in this way, Chatterton’s progress over the mass was more slide show than movie... The hatch was angled into the mass. Hatches are not supposed to be built at angles; they are meant to allow people and things to enter ships, so they are supposed to open straight down. Who would build a hatch that angled into a ship?
• The current flung Chatterton past the anchor line, slingshotting him toward the end of the wreck. In another second he would be blown into the abyss. Instinctively, he thrust out a glove. Something solid hit his hand. Chatterton caught hold of a bent piece of metal at the tip of the wreck. Beyond that metal, there was only ocean and sand. He breathed deeply and steadied himself. The end of the wreck was before him.
• Jim Beam had chipped away at Nagle’s muscles and reflexes and had begun to turn his skin yellow, but it hadn’t touched his explorer’s heart, the part of him that believed an alcoholic world still to be beautiful for the stories it hid in secret places.
• Some U-boats crept with impunity to within a few miles of American shores, close enough to tune in jazz radio stations and watch automobile headlights through their periscopes. In one month in 1940, U-boats sank 66 ships while losing only one of their own... Of the 859 U-boats that left base for frontline patrol, 648 were sunk or captured while operating at sea, a loss rate of more than 75 percent.
• Brennan thought it over. Then, in a thick, almost cartoonish Italian accent, he said, “It’s-a-not-a-MY boat, it’s-a . . .”
  “What?” Kohler asked.
  “That’s your hint,” Brennan said. Take it or leave it. “It’s-a-not-a-MY boat, it’s-a . . .”
• He suggested that Nagle make several outlandish claims—to say on Monday that he had discovered a U-boat, on Tuesday that he had found the Corvallis, on Wednesday the Carolina, and so on, until no one believed any bit of it.
• Gilgo Beach, along a stretch of barrier islands off the South Shore of Long Island. There, she turned John and MacRae loose to run like untied balloons, their bare feet on fire against the blazing sand until they had to rush into the Atlantic for relief.
• He ran faster. The ground in front of him staccatoed with gunfire. Behind him, he could hear his platoon returning fire so thick that the sky itself began to explode. Chatterton expected to be killed, he kept waiting to fall, but a blur of a feeling kept him from turning back, and that feeling was that he did not want to go through life knowing that he had given up. A second later he slid into the grass next to Lacko.
• But the medic faced an even more insidious risk: the enemy often wanted him dead more than anyone. Killing a squad’s medic meant that the soldiers would be on their own when wounded, a devastating blow to a squad’s morale.
• Gradually, he distilled certain principles that seemed to him indisputable truths, and he collected these principles like so many medicines in the aid pack of his mind...
  —  If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it.
  —  If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving.
  —  Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average.
  —  It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong.
• Chatterton took to scallop fishing from the start. He learned to cut and weld steel, tie knots, splice cable—in short, to do whatever it took... The massive dredges did not discriminate in what they pulled from the bottom of the Atlantic; along with piles of scallops came Russian fishing nets, whale skulls, bombs, cannonballs, mastodon teeth, muskets.
• In a single week he might be asked to demolish underwater concrete or install experimental pile wrap at the Port Authority Heliport or weld a rusted support beam under South Street. Every time he told his bosses, “I can do it.”... He made hands of his every body part, at once placing, say, a left calf against a wall for orientation, a right knee atop an important set of wrenches, and a boot outside a hole as a barometer for changes in current. As he spent more time in the water, his sense of touch heightened to such a pitch that he could distinguish ordinary steel from burned steel solely by the different vibrations each made against his knife... He planned relentlessly. Driving to work he rehearsed the movements of his dive the way a ballet dancer envisions his program, prioritizing procedures and even calculating the order in which he would use his tools,
• He gained a reputation as one of the best shipwreck divers on the East Coast; some said he might be among the best in the world. One day Nagle paid him the highest compliment by saying, “When you die no one will ever find your body.”
• In icy seas, these overhead pipes dripped with condensation, freezing the necks and scalps of the crewmen; often, the only escape from the chill was in the diesel motor room, where gargantuan twin engines pounded out deafening metal symphonies, creating one-hundred-plus-degree temperatures with stifling humidity and causing hearing loss to some of its operators. Wafting carbon monoxide produced by the engines chipped away at mental acuity, caused sleep disorders, and became the only recognizable flavor in whatever meal the chef could squeeze out of his postage-stamp–size galley... Flushing was a subtle skill taught in training; if performed improperly, ocean water could backwash into the boat and even sink it... Late in the war, when commanders kept the boats submerged to avoid detection, crews improvised as the trash began to reek. They stuffed waste into torpedo tubes and pressed FIRE every few days—a maneuver they dubbed the Müllschuss, or “garbage shot.”
• a man had to blink, goddamn it, please blink, Steve. Nothing. Skibinski screamed through his regulator, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” while the jungle drums of narcosis began their stampede and he tried to replace the regulator in Feldman’s mouth but that mouth just hung open, which confirmed that Feldman wasn’t breathing
• Wreck diving offers few more dangerous propositions than the sand sweep. The technique is simple enough: a diver ties a line from his penetration reel to the wreck, then backs up in the direction of the current. When he reaches a distance of, say, twenty feet, he walks a 180-degree arc in the sand, searching for scallops or artifacts—or lost divers... The diver’s life depends on his line. If he loses the line—if it gets cut on debris or slips from his grip or frays against the wreck—he is gone, a nomad in a featureless landscape without any direction back to the wreck. He then must free-ascend, risking a sloppy decompression and the likelihood that he will surface miles from the dive boat and go lost at sea.
• McMahon wondered if he should follow the crabs out to sea. He took a deep breath. He started talking to himself. “I gotta get outta here,” he said. “Crabs are talking to me. When a crab talks it’s time to go home.”
• They were fearless and first-rate wreck divers—Chatterton would give them that—but he despised their overriding lust for tonnage, a collective instinct to take every last piece of crap from a wreck until their goody bags bloated with artifacts and their supposed manhood. None of them seemed to Chatterton to love diving for knowledge or exploration or for what the sport might reveal to a man about himself. They wanted shit and lots of it, period.
• Chatterton devised his own plan. He and Glen Plokhoy, an engineer and frequent Seeker diver, would build a metal grate to block the opening Chatterton had burned into third class. The Seeker would go to the Doria two days before Bielenda’s trip... —  The grate must appear to the Wahoo divers to be loose and easily removable so that they would waste time and look foolish struggling with it... They studied the videotape and took reference measurements, then sketched plans for a five-by-six-foot, three-hundred-pound iron grate. Rather than weld it into place, they would chain it down, so that the grate would shake and the Wahoo divers would believe it was loose. They engineered a device that could be unlocked only by a custom-made wrench, and then had a friend make the wrench... The installation of the grate was flawless. It shook but did not give. It looked easy but was bulletproof.
• Richie could hardly believe the beauty beneath the surface—horseshoe crabs crawled by, minnows darted, and a jellyfish drifted past on the current—and as he moved about this place where human beings were not supposed to go, where the U-boats had glided under the noses of the world, he understood that he had penetrated another realm, that he had made that astronaut leap for which he had always yearned.
• The street toughness stitched into him by his father showed itself eagerly.
• To Kohler, Dudas seemed of another species. In a day when divers had no gauges, froze in wet suits, and prayed that their wristwatches did not flood, Dudas had gone to 250 feet and had taken the binnacle from inside the Andrea Doria. To Kohler, who was beginning to understand the jackhammer of narcosis and the true meaning of the word cold, Dudas was astronaut, mercenary, gladiator, and porpoise all rolled into one.
• In the fall of 1991 Kohler heard word of the virgin U-boat discovery. The news stopped his life. For days, he was a blur of longing and desire, pacing the floors at home and at work, distracted from family and friends, unable to sort out the details of his yearning.
• “Search the boots. If you can find boots on the wreck, look inside them. The guy says they all wrote their names inside their boots so no one else would wear them. They hated when other guys wore their boots.
• Chatterton had learned that blimps had been a formidable force in keeping U-boats submerged and in escorting ships along the eastern seaboard; that at one point during World War II more than fifteen hundred pilots had manned blimps considerably larger than the current versions used for advertising; that the blimps carried sophisticated antisubmarine technology; and that a blimp had even fought it out with a surfaced U-boat, a battle that had resulted in injury to the U-boat and the blimp plummeting from the sky.
• On any given night, a deli counterman or an accountant or a dentist might patrol the skies along the New York and New Jersey coasts, hunting U-boats with a pair of minibombs jury-rigged under the plane’s wings. So patchwork was the weapon system that pilots were sometimes told not to land with the bombs still attached, as the explosives might trigger from the jolt; instead, they were often advised to drop the bombs whether or not they had spotted a U-boat.
• For years, Kohler had believed the U-boats to be nearly invincible. Now he began to learn of “Sauregurkenzeit” or “Sour-Pickle Time,” the year when Allied ingenuity and technological and material superiority reversed the course of the U-boat war so decisively that U-boats sometimes went weeks without sinking a single enemy ship, when the hunters became the hunted.
• he had seen life pass from young men defending their country and knew that whatever the politics or justness of a country’s cause, a soldier deserved respect in death. He also understood that he might someday have to answer to a family about the bones before him, and he was unwilling to say that he had shuffled those remains in order to identify a shipwreck and maybe gain himself a little glory.
• Would the china contain the eagle and swastika? Could this be his greatest discovery of all? Kohler had to force himself not to lunge forward and start grabbing. Slowly, slowly, slowly. Finally, he completed the ten-foot swim. He suggested his hand forward and put the gentlest of squeezes on the china. The dish bent forward. Kohler let go. It sprung back into shape. Kohler understood at once. He had made the prize-winning discovery of a Chinette plate, something not invented until thirty years after the last U-boat had sailed.
• The first items out were silver-plated forks, stacked one atop another. Only these forks had been consumed so fully by electrolysis that all that remained was the rice paper–thin shape of the fork, the form of the fork...(Nagle's) hands shook from years of heavy drinking and hard living. He stopped and gathered himself and seemed to be asking a favor of his body, if only this once, to settle down long enough to be part of such a moment. His hands went quiet. He reached forward and took the forks and, without breathing, separated each from the others and laid them on the table.
• As the mud flaked away, he began to feel the imprint of letters beneath his thumb. He dunked again and rubbed harder. More letters pressed against his thumb. The hair on the back of his neck stood up. The other divers crowded closer. Chatterton kept rubbing... carved into the knife’s handle in handwritten letters, was a name. It said HORENBURG.
• Nagle’s ear-to-ear grin looked half-satanic, half-schoolboy. Both divers knew that the captain adored confrontation, and each hated to be a pawn to this appetite. But the subject of the Andrea Doria grate had been festering since Kohler had joined the U-boat trip, and Nagle, the clever bastard, had lit a fuse.
• The heart of that case is that the French are diving on an American warship we argue has protection for being a war grave. We can’t at the same time be diving a German war grave in America. Our position in court would be weakened.”... “I’m disappointed. But if we can’t actively go out there and help you with the diving,
• The next morning, Yurga called his father, who dealt with scrap-metal dealers, and asked if he might research mercury’s current value. An hour later, his father called back. Mercury was now considered a toxic waste. You had to pay others to get rid of it. Chatterton and Yurga had been millionaires for exactly twelve hours.
• trimix offered a fantasyland of advantages over breathing air in deep water:
  —  widened peripheral vision
  —  sharpened motor skills and coordination
  —  longer bottom times
  —  shorter decompression times
  —  reduced risk of oxygen toxicity and deep-water blackout
  —  elimination of narcosis
• Kohl plummeted like an anchor toward the ocean bottom. The topside divers knew at once what had happened: Kohl had not adjusted the buoyancy for his new trimix equipment. He had become what divers called a “dirt dart.” <> Dirt darts were in deep shit. The furious increase in water pressure that came with their plunge squeezed their suits into a second skin. Rapid compression caused their regulators to free-flow, exploded their sinuses and blood vessels, burst their eardrums, and induced vomiting and vertigo. And that was before they hit the bottom.
• The shark surfaced again, moving closer to Yurga.
  “Shark! Behind you!” Chatterton yelled.
  Again, Yurga turned. Again, the shark submerged.
  “Quit busting my balls!” Yurga screamed. “Come on. Get serious!”
• “I say we leave the remains undisturbed no matter what,” Kohler said.
  “I agree,” Chatterton said. “We don’t touch them. Even if it means we never solve the mystery.”
  For a moment, the divers sat in silence, startled by the finality and similarity of their thinking. Slowly, each explained his reasoning until it became clear that they had arrived at their conclusions for identical reasons.
• Their disappointment, however, did not extend to the Rouses. From the moment father and son boarded the Seeker they began their high-octane bickering, sniping at each other’s equipment, sexual prowess, age, diving ability, sandwich choice, and—particularly odd to eavesdroppers—family ancestry.
• Nagle had begun the season reflectively, taking comfort in the idea that even if he were unable to sober up and rebuild himself for diving, the Seeker’s legacy would outlive him. Now jaundiced and sicker than ever, a failure at countless rehabs, he could not bring himself to take his own boat to one of the biggest dives ever.
• Chatterton and Kohler looked into the men’s faces. Both father and son had the wide, rapidly blinking eyes of the newly condemned... The Seeker rose and fell on the raging waves like a carnival ride, each undulation threatening to launch Chatterton and Kohler into the Atlantic. An eight-foot wave pushed Chrissy under the Seeker as her bow lifted off the ocean like an executioner’s ax. The Seeker fell from the darkening sky, Chrissy helpless to move away. Chatterton and Kohler held their breath. The boat’s splash rail hurtled downward and bashed the regulator on Chrissy’s tanks, just inches from his skull, splitting the brass mechanism and releasing an explosion of rushing air from the tanks.
• The divers had read about occasions in which a torpedo’s steering system malfunctioned, causing the weapon to reverse direction in the water and head back toward its own submarine. Those derelict torpedoes were called “circle-runners” and had turned on several of their own U-boats.
• A U-boat sent to war in early 1945—as U-857 had been—stood only a 50 percent chance of returning from its patrol. A crewman’s statistical life expectancy in that period was barely sixty days. Those ordered to American or Canadian waters almost never came back.
• In that offensive, U-boats pushed up against American shores so closely that crewmen could smell the forest from their decks, watch automobiles drive the parkways, and tune in American radio stations playing the jazz so many of them loved... The Americans, however, did not remain vulnerable for long. The navy began running convoys, an ancient maritime strategy whereby armed escort vessels protected groups of boats sailing together. Now when a U-boat fired on an Allied ship, the convoy escorts would be there to spot, chase, and kill it. As convoys increased, sinkings by U-boats dropped to near nothing.
• U-boats relied on radio to communicate with German headquarters. Allied brains pounced on the dependence. They developed a radio detection system known as “Huff-Duff” (for HF/DF, or high-frequency direction finding) that allowed Allied ships at sea to fix the position of U-boats. Now a submarine using its radio—even to report the weather—was as much as announcing its location to the enemy.
• (1943) In May of that year, forty-one U-boats were destroyed by Allied forces, a disaster that came to be known as “Black May” and which Dönitz described as “unimaginable, even in my wildest dreams.” The “Happy Time” had yielded to Sauregurkenzeit, or “Sour-Pickle Time.” The hunters of the early war had now become the hunted.
• Most men, it seemed to them, went through life never really knowing themselves. A man might consider himself noble or brave or just, they believed, but until he was truly tested it would always be mere opinion. This, more than anything, is what moved the divers about the late-war U-boat man. Despite knowing his efforts would be futile, he had gone to sea determined to strike a blow. As the divers said good night that evening, each wondered if he might not be moving toward the same kind of test. The U-Who had already killed three divers.
• In Germany, Horst Bredow had urged the divers to recover this device—a mini–scuba tank and rubberized mouthpiece used by submariners to exit a sinking U-boat—because crewmen often wrote their names inside them. As Chatterton made his way up to the Seeker he found himself unusually proud, though for most of the hour he could not put his finger on why. At 20 feet, when he saw the dive boat swaying above him, he understood. In detecting beauty camouflaged in wreckage, he had done the very thing that had made Nagle great, and it had always been his dream to dive like Bill Nagle.
• “Goddamn,” Chatterton said. “The oxygen bottle exploded. The thing was still live. The escape lung blew up my garage.” <> Chatterton looked closer at the flattened cylinder. The explosion had blasted away a half century’s encrustation, the part that could not be removed with simple wiping. Chatterton pulled it close to his face. Stamped onto the flattened metal was a bit of writing. It said: 15.4.44... that’s European for April 15, 1944. That’s the hydrostatic test date, the date the bottle was examined and certified to be good.”
• It was then that Chatterton fully understood what Kohler had meant to the project. He was a first-rate diver, one of the best, and a passionate and creative researcher. But deeper than that he was a believer, and as Chatterton watched Kohler reach for a handshake, he knew that this was the most important thing of all, that in a quest in which men were asked to really know themselves, an unflinching belief in the possible survived all.
• “What do you mean you’re not going to the funeral?” Kohler asked. <> “The guy in that box is not Bill Nagle,” Chatterton said. “The guy in that box killed my friend.”
• But sometimes, when Chatterton looked up from his desk and realized that he and Kathy had not spoken for days, it reminded him of his time as a scallop fisherman. Every so often then, a shadow would creep up on the fishermen as they worked the dredges, sending the men scurrying to track the source of the shadow, which was always a great wave about to punish the boat. Now, at home, Chatterton was beginning to feel the shadow.
• “We found U-869,” Chatterton said. “It was U-869 all along.” <> Still unresolved, however, was the matter of U-869’s reported sinking off Gibraltar by two ships, the L’Indiscret and USS Fowler. Every history book had it recorded that way.
• “Don’t feel badly about this, Herbert,” Horenburg said. “Radio Calais can move anywhere on the dial—you never know where it will be. They even play German music; they know the songs we love. Don’t get gray over this, my friend. This could have happened to any radioman, even one as excellent as you.”
• And now, Siggi’s mother, Elise, was telling the local Nazi Party members to back off about Norbert, her middle son. Norbert, unlike Siegfried, was a bit slow academically, perhaps the victim of a learning disability. To the Nazis, such a weakness in the Aryan gene pool could not be tolerated. They told Elise they planned to sterilize Norbert. She told them, in so many words, to go to hell. They threatened to send her to a concentration camp, even though she was married to a war hero, even though her eldest son, Siggi, was preparing to volunteer for the navy.
• One day, as Neuerburg boarded U-869, the crew gave him the heil—the Nazi salute—in place of their usual military salute. A recent assassination attempt on Hitler had resulted in a new governmental order: military officers were now to use the heil salute. Neuerburg tore into the crew, telling them that he expected the military salute and that the heil was not to be used aboard his boat. Some crewmen tried to explain about the new order. Neuerburg told them he did not care. The heil would never again be used aboard U-869.
• To Kohler, the U-Who had evolved from an artifact site into a moral obligation. Alone among the divers he felt it his duty to give names to the fallen crewmen and closure to their families.
• “I agreed to it, John,” Kohler said. “I was getting so kooky that if she’d asked me to paint my ass pink and walk backwards I would have done that too. I missed my family.” <> “You’re walking away from diving?”
• In his darkest moments, Chatterton brushed cheeks with the idea of quitting. He imagined a time when he could run out for pizza or take his car for a spin without seeing the U-Who’s crushed control room before him, a time when he no longer wondered if he was who he hoped he was. The fantasy always felt good for a minute, but it always ended with Chatterton thinking, “When things are easy a person doesn’t really learn about himself. It’s what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that shows him who he really is. Some people never get that moment. The U-Who is my moment. What I do now is what I am.”
• Some days, he did not dare consider a return to diving. Then spring began to dab warmth into the air and Marks said it would be a shame if a man turned his back on his passion.
• “The spare-parts boxes had to be labeled with the U-boat’s number,” Palmer explained. “That way, if a part was used during a mission, they could send the box to the warehouse, have it refilled, and know which U-boat to return it to.”
• Kohler placed one hand under the lip of the trunk, the other on an engine block for purchase. He spread and planted his feet sumo wrestler–style on the steel beams that supported the engines, praying that he would not slip and plunge through the room’s grated floor. Then he reached inside himself for every muscle he had ever used, arm and stomach and neck muscles he’d first summoned as an eight-year-old boy gaffing forty-pound stripers from his father’s fishing boat. He lifted the trunk six inches off the ground. The metal ground against the steel engine blocks against which it had slept for a half century... He lifted harder. The trunk rose farther off the floor, and for a moment Kohler held it aloft, a lumberjack of the deep balancing a steel redwood.
• “We brought a three-ton chain fall to do that work. And you muscled it?”
  “I felt it could be done. I had to make my move.”
  Chatterton shook his head.
  “You’ve got a set of balls on you, Richie,” Chatterton said. “Goddamn, that was dangerous. Goddamn, that’s balls.”
• To pass the time, perhaps the crewmen organized a checkers tournament or a limerick contest or a lying competition, as had occurred on other U-boat patrols; a man could lose a day’s rations for overconfidence in such matters. Or perhaps they adopted a mascot—one U-boat had selected a fly for this purpose, which they named Emma and whose daily routines they followed with keen interest.
• CHATTERTON’S FINAL PLAN for the U-Who was audacious and lethal. He would swim into the diesel motor room with just a single tank on his back, not the customary two. He would then remove that tank and hold it in front of him—much as a child holds a kickboard when learning to swim—and push it through the narrow opening between the fallen fuel tank and the U-boat’s ceiling. Once on the other side of the diesel motor room, he would reattach the tank to his back and swim into the adjoining electric motor room, where he hoped to find identifying tags attached to boxes of spare parts. After recovering the bounty, he would swim back into the diesel motor room, pass it over the top to Kohler, again remove his single trimix tank, and slither back out the way he had come in. Only by carrying a single tank of trimix—and then taking it off—did Chatterton believe a diver could pass over the fuel tank that blocked nearly every inch of space between the electric motor room and the rest of the U-Who. <> The plan’s dangers were encyclopedic, a textbook on how to get killed inside a shipwreck. With just a single tank to breathe, Chatterton would have only twenty minutes on the other side of the obstruction.
• He spread his hands wide across the sledgehammer’s handle—using the tool in the water required a different technique from on land, one in which the diver pushed from the chest rather than swung with the arms... Naked and shiny without its encrustation, the object flashed its true identity to Chatterton. This was a five-foot-tall pressurized oxygen tank. This was the colossal big brother to the miniature version that had destroyed Chatterton’s garage. It was a miracle that the tank had not just exploded... He flashed through his options; they numbered exactly two. He could turn and leave the compartment. Or he could take another swing at the giant oxygen tank, which he would have to strike on the cap—its most dangerous spot—in order to shake it loose. <> “If the thing blows, I won’t hear anything,” Chatterton thought. “I’ll be dead and in a billion pieces.
• He tried swimming backward gently. He could not move. In that small bit of motion, the equipment on his back had become tangled on dangling electrical cables. He was now fully sewn into the wreck. Chatterton knew he did not have time to relax and reverse the process, as was necessary in such a predicament. He knew he would have to fight.
• Chatterton, his mouth now totally exposed to the ocean, kicked with force and equanimity. He had seen guys die flailing. He was near death. He would not flail. <> Chatterton torpedoed out of the diesel motor room and up toward the top of the wreck. Kohler, stunned by the sight of his friend without a regulator, gave chase behind him. Chatterton’s lungs screamed as his stage bottles came into sight. He kicked harder. Every cell in his body shrieked for oxygen and pulled at his jaws to breathe. He clenched his mouth shut. He reached the stage bottles. In a single motion, he grabbed a regulator from one of the bottles, stuck it in his mouth, and turned the valve. Fresh gas flooded into his lungs. Chatterton had come down to his final breath.
• On September 11, 2001, as terrorist-hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers, Chatterton was overseeing a commercial dive job under the World Financial Center, directly across the street from Tower One. He and his divers escaped the area without injury.