Shadow Divers (20 page)

Chatterton panned his camera around the room in slow motion, capturing as much detail as possible for later study. The bunks that had once hung from the port and starboard walls no longer existed. The boxes of food and supplies that the torpedomen slept beside or atop in this compartment had vaporized long ago. The rigging, used to move the massive torpedoes into their firing tubes, lay fractured in the sediment. A white speck caught his eye. He aimed his light at the shape. Fish scurried through cracked machinery to escape the brightness. In the light he saw a human bone, then another, then dozens more. Many men had died in this room, the place farthest from the cataclysmic control-room damage. “Jesus, what happened to this ship?” Chatterton mumbled through his regulator. He turned around to leave. Before he could begin his swim out he came face-to-face with a femur, the largest and strongest bone in the human body. He averted his gaze and drifted past it slowly until he had exited the torpedo room.

The postscript to Chatterton’s entrance was a swirling black silt that reduced visibility to zero. To exit the wreck, he would have to follow a map that existed solely in his brain. Chatterton began picking and finger-walking his way through the compartments, reversing memorized pathways and anticipating remembered dangers. Passing through the noncommissioned officers’ quarters, he hugged the sub’s starboard side in order to leave undisturbed the human remains he had seen while coming in. In nearly total darkness he moved through spaces other divers would not tempt on foot in a well-lit gymnasium. Again, he survived by favoring learning over artifacts. Again, preparation delivered him from a web of obstacles and traps. Chatterton exited the wreck through the control room, swam toward the flashing strobe he had clipped to the anchor line, and began a ninety-minute ascent to the surface.

Still steaming over Chatterton’s dibs on the U-boat’s forward section, Kohler decided to explore aft instead. Remembering an area of damage on top of the wreck’s stern, he wondered if he might gain entrance to an unexplored section there. His instincts were excellent. The damaged area had been blasted open by some external force—he could see that much because the metal had been forced down and into the U-boat—and while the damage was nowhere near as extensive as that in the control room, it left enough room for a courageous diver to drop in and land where he might. Kohler hovered above the open wound, burped a breath of air from his buoyancy compensator, and sank into the U-boat.

As Kohler settled into the wreck, he detected the outline of two adjacent torpedo tubes in the haze of his white light. At once he understood where he was and the implication of his discovery: this was the aft torpedo room inside what was likely a Type IX U-boat, the kind built for patrols of longer range and duration. Though Chatterton had intended to inspect the stern torpedo tubes himself, Kohler had beaten him to it. In just a half hour, the two divers had answered the two most important technical questions about the mystery U-boat.

Kohler shined his lights about the room. Under some fallen debris he found a metal tag and an escape lung, the combination life vest and breathing apparatus used by crewmen to escape a submerged U-boat. Kohler’s pulse raced. These were just the kinds of items that often bore identifying marks. He pulled them close to his mask. Any writing that might have been embossed on the tag, however, had been eaten away by nature. The lung, small technical marvel though it was, came up blank as well. Kohler packed the items in his goody bag and began a short swim aft to get a closer look at the torpedo tubes. Like Chatterton, he knew that the tube hatches had often been tagged and sometimes bore the names of the crewmen’s loves.

Kohler never got to the tubes. During his swim, he noticed the edge of a white dish protruding from the debris on the floor. Pay dirt! He would score some china after all. He crab-walked toward the dish, careful not to raise any more silt than was necessary. 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. New divers are often surprised to find such modern objects aboard old shipwrecks, but a veteran like Kohler had seen Budweiser cans, plastic prescription-medicine bottles, a Kotex applicator, even a Barney the Dinosaur balloon on hundred-year-old wrecks, and he understood that such objects had been dropped off passing boats and had drifted along the ocean bottom until they got caught up in a wreck. Kohler removed the plate and stuffed it in his goody bag, the underwater equivalent of picking up a hot-dog wrapper in a park. Silt spilled around the hole he made. Another white object came into view. This one was no paper plate. This one was a femur.

Kohler went cold. Unlike Chatterton, he had rehearsed no plan for dealing with human remains. He had never seen bones on a wreck before this. And he had never faced a moral decision at 230 feet with narcosis banging. He knew this: he was no grave robber. He would not disturb bones to get artifacts. But should he dig nearby? That was a different story. Nearby was different. He looked again at the femur. He turned even colder. His breathing became more rapid.

Kohler backed away several inches, and in his movement the silt swirled black and buried the bone as quickly as it had been revealed. He had spent the last six weeks learning about U-boat men. He had come to sense the punishing and tedious nature of their work, the constant peril of their patrols, the hopelessness of their late-war situation. All that, however, was an experience of the mind. Here was a femur, the strongest of human bones, torn free from what had once been a human being. That bone was the bridge between book and imagination, and it stopped Kohler. Soon his coldness was replaced by a pall of regret. He found himself thinking, “I didn’t mean to disturb you” as he watched the area where he had seen the bone. He decided to return to the
Seeker.
Kohler worked his way forward until he was under the damaged opening at the ceiling, injected a bit of air into his wings, and ascended out of the U-boat.

A few minutes later he began his ninety-minute ascent up the anchor line. For a while, he contemplated the fate of a U-boat in which men had died so far away from the boat’s epicenter of damage. But as his decompression continued, the crescendo of his frustration with Chatterton renewed. He could not tolerate the idea of this diver stealing the visibility in a gold mine of artifacts under the pretext of shooting video. A mystery U-boat full of china and the guy is shooting video!

As Kohler climbed aboard the
Seeker,
divers gathered to inspect the tag and escape lung he had recovered. Some told him of Chatterton’s push to the forward torpedo room. Kohler had heard enough. He decided to have another word with Nagle.

In the wheelhouse, his dry suit still dripping, Kohler explained to Nagle that his culture was Atlantic Wreck Divers to the core, an ethos in which divers worked as a team for the good of the group, none of this me-first-every-time bullshit. Chatterton entered the room behind him. Kohler rolled his eyes. Chatterton shut the door and spoke in a near whisper.

“I saw skulls up front,” he said.

“I saw a long bone, a femur, in the back,” Kohler answered.

“There are a lot of bones up front,” Chatterton said.

“Did you videotape the skull?” Kohler asked.

“No. I didn’t videotape any of the bones.”

“What? You didn’t videotape the bones? You steal the viz so you can shoot video, then you come across human remains and you don’t tape them? What the hell were you doing down there?”

For a moment Chatterton said nothing. Nagle waved his hand as if to say, “Leave me out of this.”

“I deliberately did not video them,” Chatterton said. “It’s a matter of respect.”

Kohler begrudgingly nodded his agreement and left the wheelhouse. In the salon, he fixed himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and relaxed. He would need to spend three hours off-gassing his body’s built-up nitrogen before he could splash for a second dive. Chatterton entered a few minutes later, popped his videotape into the VCR, and studied his first dive. Neither said anything to the other.

Chatterton was the first to return to the water. His goal was to search the area around the galley and the noncommissioned officers’ quarters for cabinets that might contain the ship’s logbook, maps, or other written materials like those he knew had been safely stored in wooden furniture on the Chicago U-boat. He would avoid the forward section of the NCO quarters so as not to disturb the human remains he had seen there.

Chatterton had little trouble reaching his target area. He got purchase on some low-lying machinery and began digging, feeling around for cabinet shapes. He found none, but he did run his hand along a smaller object he took to be a box. A moment later he had unearthed the item from beneath a pile of silt and sediment. It appeared to be a silverware drawer about eleven inches by eight inches, with sections for knives, spoons, and forks. A gelatinous black mud had cocooned the drawer and had sealed its contents. Chatterton looked closer and saw the outline of spoons in one of the sections. He nestled the silverware drawer into his bag and turned back for the anchor line. Perhaps there might be a date or year stamped on one of the utensils inside.

Not long after Chatterton had departed the sub, Kohler entered. This time, he beelined to the forward part of the wreck, exactly where Chatterton had recovered the dishes on the last trip. If he had to deal with Chatterton’s silt, so be it. He was going to bag up.

The visibility was not as bad as Kohler had expected; he could see landmarks, and to an Atlantic Wreck Diver landmarks meant life. He navigated through the last remnants of Chatterton’s haze and into the noncommissioned officers’ quarters, a penetration only he and Chatterton dared risk on so virgin a wreck. He poked through sediment and debris, looking for the rounded white corners and feeling for the smooth surfaces that meant china to savvy divers. He found a four-inch-tall cologne bottle imprinted with a German word,
Glockengasse,
which he took to be a brand name. He remembered that U-boat men splashed cologne on themselves to battle the body odor inevitable on hundred-day patrols in broiling boats in which showers were unavailable. But he had not come for cologne; he had come for dishes. He resumed his search in earnest, running his hand through silt and sediment the way a child works a sandbox. He found nothing. He dug farther. As he cleared some debris he came upon what he could only describe to himself as a boneyard: skulls, ribs, a femur, shins, a forearm. That cold settled over him again. “I’m standing in a mass grave,” he told himself. “I need to leave now.” He packed the cologne bottle into his bag and turned around. The silt worsened from haze to black. Kohler breathed deeply and shut his eyes for a moment. Navigate. As long as you can breathe you’re okay. He remembered his way and reversed it in his mind. He maneuvered back out of the U-boat as if following a trail of lighted bread crumbs. The Atlantic Wreck Divers had taught him well.

Back near the surface, Chatterton clipped his goody bag to a line attached to the boat—he dared not climb the
Seeker
’s ladder in bouncy seas holding such delicate bounty. On board, he undressed and dried, then fished his bag from the ocean. Divers gathered to inspect the haul. Chatterton took the silverware drawer from his bag and reached into the gelatin. A methane smell of rotten eggs and petroleum burst from the artifact, a final protest at being wrested from its peace. Various expletives ushered forth from the onlookers.

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 stepped forward. He had seen this kind of artifact before and understood that the slightest jolt could cause it to crumble into powder. He reached to spread the forks across the table for closer inspection. His 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. Each of the forks was stamped, on the underside of its handle at the widest part, with the eagle and swastika. Nagle moved them around delicately, searching for any other identifying mark. When he found none, he backed away and began breathing again. His hands began to shake so badly that he struggled just to put them in his pockets.

Next out of the drawer came several stainless steel spoons, these still sturdy enough to use for breakfast cereal. The spoons were spread on the table for inspection. They bore no marks. That left only one section of the silverware drawer: the knives. Chatterton looked closely. Only one utensil appeared to be in that section, a knife with a stainless steel blade and wood handle. He fished into the remaining gelatin and pulled out the utensil.

The knife was covered in mud. Chatterton dunked it in a bucket of fresh water and began rubbing the handle between his thumb and forefinger to remove the dirt. 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. The final crusts of clay fell to the table. Beneath his thumb, carved into the knife’s handle in handwritten letters, was a name. It said
HORENBURG.

For several seconds, no one moved or said anything. Finally, Brad Sheard, the aerospace engineer, stepped forward and clapped Chatterton on the back.