Shadow Divers (19 page)

As Chatterton continued to field the rush of phone calls and letters, he got word of a black plan. Bielenda had secured the exact location of the U-boat wreck site. He was planning to hit the wreck any day. Worst of all, the numbers were said to have come from Nagle.

The plan, as Chatterton heard it, was this: Bielenda had organized a dedicated mission to the wreck site to recover Feldman’s body. Another captain had offered his boat and fuel for the trip; Bielenda was to supply the divers, who would search the area for the corpse. Chatterton doubted that Bielenda or the others would make even a perfunctory search for the body; it had been a month since the accident, the tides had been strong, and Feldman had never been inside the wreck in the first place. He called Nagle at home. He heard ice clinking in a glass.

“Ah shit, John. I gave up the numbers,” Nagle admitted.

The way Nagle explained it, he had received a late-night phone call from another dive boat captain and longtime friend. Nagle had been drinking. The captain had announced that he had three sets of numbers and knew one of them to be the U-boat’s location. Nagle listened as the captain recited the numbers. The captain was right—one of the sets was correct. Nagle suspected, even in his drunken haze, that Bielenda had wrung the general location from his Coast Guard cronies, then had asked this captain to check his voluminous book of numbers for anything close. Now the captain, who was supposed to be Nagle’s friend, was leaning on him to reveal the exact location. Ordinarily, Nagle would have chewed off the captain’s head for the attempt. But in his stupor, still guilty over Feldman’s death and the
Seeker
’s inability to bring the diver home, Nagle mumbled something about location number two “possibly” being correct.

“I knew I was fucked as soon as I hung up,” he told Chatterton.

Shortly after Chatterton spoke to Nagle, his own phone rang. Bielenda was calling. He told Chatterton that he had organized a mission to recover Feldman’s body. He invited Chatterton to come along.

Chatterton’s face flushed. For a moment he entertained the idea of accepting the invitation, certain that Bielenda would skip the rescue aspect of the mission and allow the divers to go straight into the U-boat for artifacts. He demanded to know Bielenda’s true intentions. Bielenda insisted that the mission was dedicated to recovering Feldman’s body. Chatterton pressed, asking where the
Wahoo
captain intended to look for the body. Bielenda told him that he would search around the wreck. This was too much for Chatterton, who believed that Bielenda’s only intention was to dive the U-boat. He called Bielenda back and told him what he thought of the plan. Bielenda protested, but Chatterton would hear none of it. Spewing out a stew of expletives, Chatterton told Bielenda he wanted nothing to do with the so-called recovery mission and hung up.

A few days later, Bielenda and several divers made the trip. Some of the divers did, in fact, make a good-faith search for Feldman. Others just dove the wreck. No one saw a corpse. According to one of the divers on the trip, many went home that night with an overriding impression: This wreck is lunatic dangerous. This wreck is going to eat people.

Word of the recovery mission reached Chatterton and Kohler a day later. They had a single question for their sources: Did anyone on the trip identify the U-boat? The answer was that no one had come close. Neither Chatterton nor Kohler was surprised. But each of them suspected that Bielenda would be coming back. So long as Nagle and the
Seeker
remained in the spotlight, they believed, the pirate flag of Bielenda’s intention would fly at full mast.

On a Monday in early November, just after the recovery mission, the skies bathed New Jersey in sunlight. The sight rejuvenated Nagle, and he called Chatterton.

“We can make it to the U-boat one more time,” Nagle said. “We can go Wednesday. We can identify this thing Wednesday. Are you in or out?”

“Have I ever been out?” Chatterton asked.

Nagle and Chatterton made phone calls. The trip was planned for November 6, 1991. Since Feldman’s death, some of the divers from the discovery trip had decided not to tempt the U-boat again. Everyone else was in. Two empty bunks remained for Wednesday. Nagle called some legends.

Tom Packer and Steve Gatto were perhaps the most formidable deep-wreck diving team on the eastern seaboard. In a sport in which the buddy system was often shunned for its potential dangers, Packer and Gatto seemed to exist as a single organism, intuiting the other’s moves and needs in ways usually reserved for identical twins. Many in the wreck-diving community referred to the team as “Packo-Gacko” for the unity with which they negotiated their dives. Packer had been part of Nagle’s team when that crew took the bell off the
Doria.
Gatto had recovered the
Doria
’s helm a few years later. They rarely gave up on a wreck without getting what they had come for. They told Nagle they were coming to identify the U-boat.

The divers gathered on the
Seeker
for a head count near midnight. Again, Kohler had arrived decked out in his gang colors—denim jacket, skull-and-crossbones patch, “Atlantic Wreck Divers” logo. Chatterton shook his head at the sight. Kohler shot back his own look, one that said, “You got a fuckin’ problem?” Neither spoke a word. Memories of Feldman still arched over the
Seeker.
Each diver answered “Yeah” or “Yo” when his name was called, then made his way to the salon without much of the usual carousing and joking.

Lying in their bunks on opposite ends of the salon, Chatterton and Kohler mentally rehearsed their dive plans. Chatterton would use his first dive for two purposes. First, he would follow the advice of Harry Cooper of the Sharkhunters club and inspect the submarine for saddle tanks, the externally affixed compartments primarily used for fuel in Type VII U-boats, the most common of the German fleet. If he had time, he would also look to see if the submarine contained two stern torpedo tubes, the narrow cylinders by which the fired weapon left the boat. Cooper had suggested that a U-boat so configured was likely one of the larger Type IX models, while the Type VIIs contained just a single stern torpedo tube.

For his part, Kohler had the eagle and swastika in his crosshairs. Every day for six weeks he had imagined recovering a Nazi dish of his own, of reaching into a mystery and pulling out a witness to a time when the world could have gone either way. He would not tolerate another day without ownership of such history. He was going straight for the dishes.

Chatterton dressed early the next morning. He, Packer, and Gatto would set the hook, then dive the wreck first. They would enjoy pristine visibility but would create silt and sediment clouds for subsequent divers, making artifact recovery more difficult. Kohler got wind of the plan. He stormed the stairs to the wheelhouse, where Chatterton was shooting the breeze with Nagle.

“Bill, what the hell is going on with this guy?” Kohler asked, pointing to Chatterton.

“What’s wrong, Richie?” Nagle asked.

“He’s gonna fuck the viz for me. I’m going forward for dishes. He went first last time. Let me go first today.”

“John’s going to videotape,” Nagle said. “You splash after him. And don’t go forward and mess up his viz. He needs clean water to shoot in.”

“What? Why does he automatically splash first every time? He eats all the good viz while the rest of us get silt and clouds. Where’s our fair shot?”

“Listen, Richie,” Chatterton interjected. “You don’t know what it’s like down there yet—”

“You’re right,” Kohler interrupted. “No one knows what it’s like because we can never go down there in good viz. I planned to go forward today, I’m looking for dishes. Now Bill tells me I gotta go somewhere else. That’s a little unfair, don’t you think?”

“John’s going first, he’s a captain,” Nagle said. “There’s plenty of room on the U-boat, Richie. Go somewhere else on your first dive.”

Kohler shook his head and returned to the deck, muttering patchwork expletives that all ended in the word “Chatterton.” He hated Nagle’s decision but would respect the word of a captain on his own boat. He would go somewhere else on the wreck.

The water was calm and the skies partly cloudy when Chatterton, Packer, and Gatto splashed. They tied into the wreck just above the damaged control room, then waved good luck to one another and parted ways. Chatterton swam along the side of the submarine, searching for the saddle tanks Cooper had spoken of. He saw none. This was good evidence that the submarine was not a Type VII, and an invaluable piece of information in further researching the wreck. He would inspect the stern torpedo tubes later; to swim that distance now would consume too much valuable dive time. Instead, he would enter the wreck in the control room below him and videotape his push toward the forward torpedo room.

As Chatterton moved to go inside the wreck he could see Packer and Gatto still hovering outside the U-boat’s torn-open control room. He knew the body language of excellent divers; the team had taken measure of the sub’s tangle of interior dangers and had decided against challenging the wreck straightaway. “Smart guys,” Chatterton thought to himself as he drifted inside. At least for now, Packer and Gatto were not going to identify the wreck.

The control room, for all its ground-zero devastation, looked like home to Chatterton. He had studied videotapes of his last dives the way a football coach watches film, memorizing formations and openings, envisioning jogs and hopscotches that might deliver him past the myriad obstacles. He had not been to the U-boat for six weeks, but he saw order in the chaos for all his video study, and that feeling of mastery was what he had come for.

Chatterton glided forward through the control room, crocheting himself between dangling cables, juking around dead machinery, and pointing his camera in every direction until he had passed the commander’s quarters on the port side and the sound and radio rooms to the starboard. He moved easily past the galley to the officers’ quarters, the place where he had found the dishes in late September. Now it was time to push toward the forward torpedo room, the U-boat’s forwardmost compartment. But the navigational videos he had memorized from previous trips went snowy in his brain; he had never been this far forward. If he was to continue forward, he would have to do so by guts and instinct.

Video camera raised high in the compartment, Chatterton moved his fins and inched forward. A wooden partition materialized before him; the path to the torpedo room was blocked by a fallen piece of cabinetry. Chatterton swam closer. He allowed the water around him to still. Slowly, he raised his right arm to shoulder level and opened his palm, then held the position motionless, as if he were a python about to strike at prey. When everything in the compartment settled, he thrust his arm forward, crashing his hand into the partition. The wood exploded, spitting a cloud of sawdust and debris about the room. Chatterton froze and allowed the dying wood its fall. When the bulk of the particulate matter had sunk to the floor and some of the visibility returned, he could see the circular hatch leading to the torpedo room at the front end of the U-boat. He moved his fins and again crept forward.

Now he hovered in the noncommissioned officers’ quarters, the place where crewmen like the navigator, chief machinist, and senior radioman slept. Chatterton remembered from Chicago that there might be dishes and other artifacts in the compartment. He scanned the debris and sediment piled on the port-side floor area for the familiar white of china. He saw the white. He inched closer. This was a different white. He moved still closer, until the white became a round shape with eye sockets and cheekbones and a nasal cavity and an upper jaw. This was a skull. Chatterton stopped. He allowed some silt to settle. Beside the skull lay a long bone, perhaps a forearm or shin, and beside it several smaller bones. Chatterton recalled the open hatches atop the submarine. If men had attempted to flee this U-boat, at least some of them had never made it out alive.

Now Chatterton faced a decision. He had been advised by some to search pockets, boots, and other personal effects he might discover inside the sub—those were the likeliest places to find a silver wristwatch or a wallet inscribed with a crewman’s name, or maybe a cigarette lighter or cigarette case a crewman had taken to a silversmith to have his U-boat’s number engraved on it. Chatterton knew that clothes and personal effects often lay near bones. He did not move. If he searched for personal effects, however carefully, he might disturb the human remains, and he was not willing to do that. He had contemplated this possibility after discovering the dishes and realizing that the boat had likely sunk with crewmen aboard, and in every iteration he came out resolved the same. This was a war grave and these were fallen soldiers. He knew firsthand what fallen soldiers looked like and what a fallen soldier meant in a world of wars and maniac leaders; 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.

Chatterton turned his head away from the skull so as not to stare. He kicked his fins and moved forward, allowing the remains to fade back to blackness behind him. A moment later the forward torpedo room took shape in the distance. As Chatterton drifted closer, he could see that the room’s round hatch—the hole through which crewmen had moved in and out—was open but blocked by a piece of fallen machinery. Chatterton lifted the obstruction, moved it aside, and swam into the compartment. Two torpedoes, including the one he had seen from atop the submarine on the Labor Day discovery trip, lay poised and pointed forward, seemingly as ready for firing as they had been during World War II. Only the top two of the room’s four torpedo tubes were visible; the other pair lay underneath several feet of silt and debris that had piled up and into the middle of the room. Chatterton knew from research that the torpedo-tube hatches were sometimes marked by identifying tags. He also recalled that the torpedomen often wrote their nicknames or the names of girlfriends and wives on the outside of the hatches. He swam forward and searched for such evidence, but any trace of a tag or writing on the hatches had been eaten away by time and seawater. This wreck, even at its tip, refused to surrender its secret.