Shadow Divers (30 page)
“I was in the wreck and fuck this! I’m cold! I’m hot! I can’t feel my legs!”
Lander stroked his head.
“Please shoot me!” Chrissy begged. “It hurts so bad. Someone find a gun and shoot me. Please kill me. Dad! Dad!”
For the next ninety minutes, Chatterton and others continued CPR on Chris’s dead body. Crowell, who had cut the anchor line, headed thirty degrees into the wind as instructed by the Coast Guard, then began a head count. Each diver called out, “Here.” Crowell dropped the
Seeker’
s antennas to allow the helicopter to approach unobstructed. He ordered everyone into life jackets, then demanded that any loose items be moved into the salon or secured to the deck; the helicopter’s prop wash could turn a loose face mask into a deadly missile or suck up a sleeping bag into its rotors and crash.
On the horizon, the divers could see the orange-and-white Coast Guard chopper speeding toward them. All but Chatterton, Kohler, and Lander ran into the salon to stay out of its way. As the chopper lowered its shoulder and swooped toward the
Seeker,
the whine of its jet engines blanketed the sky and its rotors made an upside-down rainstorm of the water still sloshing on the deck. The chopper settled to a hover just over the
Seeker’
s bow and strained to hold its position in the roiling winds. From the side door, a muscular search-and-rescue swimmer dressed in a Day-Glo orange dry suit, gloves, hood, goggles, and fins jumped feetfirst toward the ocean, one hand stretched across his stomach, the other holding his mask, a perfect dart into a violent sea. As he surfaced, he threw a medical bag onto the
Seeker’
s deck and climbed aboard the boat. He made no introductions and offered no welcome gestures. Instead, he strode directly to Chatterton.
“You’re a little slow on those chest compressions,” the swimmer said from behind rounded goggles. “It should be one-two . . . one-two . . .”
“I’ve been doing CPR on this guy for ninety minutes,” Chatterton answered, still pushing into Chris’s chest. “He’s dead.”
The swimmer pivoted and looked at Chrissy, who still had color in his face and was writhing in pain.
“Okay, we’re going to take both these guys—one at a time,” the swimmer said.
“Listen to me,” Chatterton told the swimmer. “I’m telling you this guy is dead. We need to take all our prayers and fucking hope and energy and throw it into that kid, who’s still alive. Forget the old man. If he were to sit up, he’d tell you the same thing.”
“That’s not the way we do it,” the swimmer said. “We’re taking both of them. One at a time.”
Now Chatterton was in the Vietnamese jungle. Bullets flew past his ears and staccatoed the dirt. Long-atrophied triage instincts flared to life.
“Taking the old man will cost you twenty minutes,” Chatterton said. “Take the son and rush him to a recompression chamber as fast as possible. The time you waste with the father might cost the kid his life. I’m begging you. Forget the father.”
“Not possible,” the swimmer said. “We take them both. One at a time.”
The swimmer radioed to the chopper to move in and drop the basket. A moment later, the metal stretcher was being lowered by cable toward the
Seeker.
“No one touch anything!” the swimmer yelled. “This thing has a static charge that can blow you off your feet. Let the basket hit the boat’s rail and discharge first.”
The basket pendulumed in the howling winds before hitting a rail on the
Seeker
and exploding with the discharge of static electricity. The swimmer ran to the basket, unclipped it, and waved the chopper away to ease the effects of its prop wash.
The swimmer pulled the basket toward Chrissy, who was now bundled in a blanket, still screaming for his legs, still telling stories about monsters. He placed Chrissy inside and crossed his arms mummy-style. The helicopter dragged its cable through the water until it hit the boat. Chatterton, Kohler, and the swimmer lifted Chrissy’s basket onto the gunwale and attached the cable. A moment later, the helicopter was heaving Chrissy into the sky.
“Look, I’m begging you,” Chatterton told the swimmer. “Leave now. The kid’s life depends on this. It’s going to take twenty minutes to get that basket back down here to load up a guy who’s already dead.”
“Not possible,” the swimmer said.
Chatterton whirled toward Kohler.
“Richie, take all the information you gathered—all the vital signs and notes and dive profiles—and put them in a waterproof bag. Then go into the salon and get the Rouses’ wallets—it will be hectic and messy in there, but you will be able to find them if you stay with it. Put the wallets in the bag, too. Make certain that this swimmer leaves with that bag.”
Kohler bolted for the salon. He tore through sleeping bags, dumped duffel bags, and overturned suitcases until he found both wallets, then rifled through the kitchen drawers until he found a Ziploc bag. Lander gave him the vital signs, notes, and dive profiles, and he packaged everything and made true the seal. As he opened the salon’s door, he was blasted by seawater and winds from the chopper’s blades. He pushed forward and pressed the bag into the swimmer’s hands.
Now the basket was coming down for Chris. Chatterton continued his chest compressions, muttering, “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch . . .” In the jungle he could have run to save Chrissy—he always ran—and even when the grunts shook their heads he ran anyway, because it was the right thing to do and because it had always been in him to run. Here, as the chopper sent a basket for a dead guy while a live kid’s blood foamed and choked his heart, Chatterton had nowhere to run, and that finality drowned him, because he had never in his life been unable to run.
It took twenty minutes to load Chris onto the chopper. After both Rouses were aboard, the helicopter lowered the basket a final time for the swimmer. The jet engines screamed as the chopper swooped away and raced toward the recompression chamber at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx.
One by one the divers made their way from the salon and toward Chatterton. Each thanked him or hugged him. Everyone knew that Chris was dead. Everyone believed Chrissy would make it.
The trip back to Brielle was somber but hopeful. Hospital recompression could take hours; the divers hoped to get word of Chrissy’s condition by the next morning. The metal schematic, which had held so much promise and which had brought such optimism, lay forgotten, wrapped in a towel in a Tupperware container.
That evening Lander called Chatterton at home.
“Chrissy didn’t make it,” she said. “He died in the chamber.”
Chatterton put down the receiver. In thirty-six years, there had been several thousand dives on the
Andrea Doria,
the most dangerous of all shipwrecks. Six people had died. In a single year, the
U-Who
had claimed three lives. Chatterton walked into his office. For months he had come here to gaze at the Horenburg knife and ask, “Who are you? What happened to you?” This time his eyes went through the knife. He sat for hours, not asking much of anything.
CHAPTER TEN
HISTORY MAULED
S
HORTLY AFTER THE
R
OUSES DIED,
Chatterton and Kohler set out for the
U-Who
to retrieve the fallen divers’ equipment. They had heard reports of Chrissy’s recompression-chamber experience at Jacobi. The bubbles in his system had turned his blood into sludge. Kohler smoked thirty cigarettes on the way to the wreck and wondered how long he could continue refusing the voodoo of trimix in favor of air.
Inside the wreck’s galley, Chatterton shot footage of the fallen cabinet and shelves. The tangled penetration line Chrissy had relied on for navigation had been twisted around the ten-foot-long piece of canvas he had worked to excavate. In the now-pristine visibility, Chatterton recognized this canvas as part of a life raft. Its German writing gave generic instructions for use. Outside the wreck, Kohler discovered the three stage bottles the divers had not been able to find in their confusion. Each was marked “Rouse.” None of them was inscribed with a first name; the tanks were interchangeable between father and son.
At home, Chatterton and Kohler returned to the business of research. Now armed with the information from the schematic, they tore into their reference books in search of Type IXC U-boats built at Germany’s Deschimag-Bremen shipyard. Fifty-two such U-boats, it turned out, had never returned from patrol. That list of fifty-two, the divers agreed, could easily be narrowed. Over rib eyes at Scotty’s, they agreed on two exclusionary parameters:
1. Eliminate any U-boat in which crewmen survived the sinking. If there were survivors, the U-boat’s identity would be known and accurate in the historical record.
2. Eliminate any U-boat built with a deck gun. The divers had already determined that the
U-Who
had been built without a deck gun; any Type IX constructed at Deschimag-Bremen with that weapon, therefore, could not be the
U-Who.
Chatterton and Kohler set out for Washington to begin the elimination process. Reference books indicated that there had been survivors on twenty-two of the fifty-two U-boats on their list. That left thirty U-boats to consider. Of these, ten had been built with deck guns. The list was now down to twenty possible U-boats.
“One of these U-boats on this single piece of notebook paper is our sub,” Kohler said.
“We are now looking at the answer,” Chatterton said. “We just have to narrow this list down further.”
Neither man could remember having been so excited. This was original research. This was exploration.
Back in New Jersey, the divers took their usual table at Scotty’s and began to brainstorm. They needed additional exclusionary criteria to further narrow the list of twenty. They quickly settled on a plan. They would return to the BdU KTBs—the German war diaries—to inspect where U-boat headquarters had ordered and plotted each of the remaining U-boats on their list. Any submarine the Germans believed to be operating more than a few hundred miles from the U.S. East Coast would be eliminated from the list of twenty. After all, the Germans would know better than anyone where their U-boats were patrolling.
The divers planned to return to Washington the next week. Chatterton would research half the boats, Kohler the other half. At midnight the night before the trip, Kohler’s phone rang. The caller did not speak. The only evidence of another person on the other end was the sound of ice clinking in a glass. That sound meant the caller was Nagle.
“Hey, Richie, it’s me,” Nagle said. “Think we’ll ever figure out this U-boat?”
“Sure, Billy, we will,” Kohler said. “What’s going on? It’s midnight.”
“Ah, I’m sitting here alone just thinking about the U-boat. You know, Richie, sometimes I just want to end it all . . .”
“What are you talking about, Bill?”
“This is bullshit, Richie. I got my gun right here. I should blow my fucking head off right now.”
“Whoa, Bill, hold on. You got everything in the world, man. You got a boat, a beautiful family back in Pennsylvania, money, a nice house. All you gotta do is run a boat. That’s a nice life. I’ll take that life.”
“Ah, you ain’t got no clue!” Nagle exploded. “Feldman’s dead. The Rouses are dead. My old friend John Dudas is dead. I see all these dead guys in my dreams, Richie. I gotta go . . .”
Nagle hung up. Kohler’s fingers pounded out Chatterton’s phone number.
“John, it’s Richie. Bill’s gonna kill himself—”
“He does this sometimes,” Chatterton said, still groggy. “He’s in a terrible way. I’ve tried to intervene. His family has intervened, his girlfriend, too. I’ve taken him to rehabs. You know what he does? He takes a few weeks off. He gets himself just well enough to enjoy drinking again, checks himself out, then stops at the liquor store on the way home. I don’t think he’ll kill himself, at least not with a gun. I think Jim Beam’s the weapon of choice.”
“Can we do anything?” Kohler asked.
“We’ve all been trying for years,” Chatterton said. “I don’t know what else anyone can do.”
The divers returned to Washington and attacked the U-boat Control diaries. According to the German records, eighteen of the twenty U-boats on the divers’ list had been operating in or ordered to areas so distant from New Jersey as to be unworthy of further consideration.
That left two U-boats
—U-857
and
U-879.
According to the diaries, each of these submarines had been ordered to attack targets of opportunity on the American East Coast. As the divers read further they came upon a bombshell. Both of these submarines had been docked in Norway, in early 1945—the same place and roughly the same date as Horenburg’s boat,
U-869.
“That could explain the knife!” Kohler said.
“Exactly,” Chatterton said. “Maybe Horenburg lent the knife to a guy on the U-boat next to his. Maybe he lost it and it ended up on a nearby boat. Maybe someone stole it. Any way you look at it, the knife now makes sense. One of these two submarines has got to be the
U-Who.
It’s either
U-857
or
U-879.
We’re down to two U-boats.”
The divers rushed to their history books. According to these texts,
U-857
had been sunk off Boston by the USS
Gustafson,
while
U-879
had been destroyed off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, by the USS
Buckley
and USS
Reuben James.
That seemed to leave no chance that the mystery wreck was either
U-857
or
U-879.
“Let’s do this,” Chatterton said. “Let’s check the files for the sinkings of these two subs. Let’s see for ourselves what the navy says about how these two U-boats were killed.”
“Are you saying these two U-boats might not have been sunk where the history books say they were?” Kohler asked.
“I’m saying we have to check,” Chatterton said. “I’m getting the feeling we have to check everything.”
It was evening by now, so the divers packed their gear and found a thirty-five-dollar motel room on the city’s outskirts. The next morning they returned to the NHC, drooling to get at the navy files for their remaining two U-boats, one of which had to be the answer to their mystery.
The divers looked first at navy files for the sinking of the
U-857
off Boston, which gave this account: While patrolling Cape Cod on April 5, 1945,
U-857
fired a torpedo at the American tanker
Atlantic States,
wounding but not sinking her. American warships were dispatched to the area to hunt and kill
U-857.
Two days later, one of those warships, the destroyer USS
Gustafson,
obtained a sonar contact on an underwater object near Boston. It fired several Hedgehog bombs into the ocean toward the contact. Crewmen reported hearing an explosion shortly thereafter, and then smelling oil.
And that was it. No evidence of a U-boat had floated to the surface. No blobs of oil had been spotted on the surface. The divers could not believe what they read next. Navy assessors who analyzed the
Gustafson
’s attack had written the following conclusion:
It is considered that although a submarine, known to have been in this area, may have been lost, it was not lost as a result of this attack. It is therefore recommended that this incident be assessed “E”—probably slightly damaged.
“Wait a minute,” Kohler said. “The grade on this attack report says B—probably sunk.”
“Yeah, but look here,” Chatterton said, pointing to the report. “The original grade of ‘E’ is crossed out. Someone changed it to a ‘B.’”
The divers knew what the alteration meant.
“Son of a bitch,” Kohler said. “The postwar assessors upgraded this report!”
Chatterton and Kohler had only recently learned about the postwar assessors. As navy investigators, it was the assessors’ task after the war to make a final report on the fate of all U-boats. In most cases the evidence was clear-cut and the assessors’ job simple. In rarer instances, when a U-boat could not be accounted for, the assessors stretched for an explanation—they were loath to leave question marks in the history books.
“That must have been what happened here,” Chatterton said. “The
Gustafson
never sank
U-857.
The U-boat survived the Hedgehog attack, continued past Boston, then sank somewhere else. After the war, the assessors needed an explanation for the loss of
U-857.
So they looked at this really dubious attack by the
Gustafson
and said, ‘Let’s upgrade it from an “E” to a “B.”’ They didn’t care that the original navy assessors knew the
Gustafson
hadn’t sunk a submarine. They just wanted
U-857
accounted for so they could move on with their business.”
For a moment the divers could only shake their heads.
“Well, if the
Gustafson
didn’t sink
U-857
off Boston,” Kohler finally asked, “what happened to that submarine?”
“We gotta figure that out for ourselves,” Chatterton said.
The divers checked various German documents. An hour later they had their answer.
According to German diaries,
U-857
had been ordered to proceed south along the American East Coast. She had last attacked a ship off Cape Cod. That meant New York and New Jersey lay two hundred miles away—to the south.
Neither Chatterton nor Kohler could move. Here was a U-boat that fit every criterion they had established, had possibly been docked beside Horenburg’s sub, had likely survived the
Gustafson,
and was believed by the Germans to be on her way toward New Jersey.
“It’s gotta be
U-857,
” Chatterton said.
“I think we’ve got our U-boat,” Kohler said.
The divers, however, still had to inspect the box of files for
U-879.
Again, they found history mauled.
Over the last half century, various assessors had ascribed three fates to
U-879:
they first pronounced her lost without a trace; then sunk off Halifax in Canadian waters; then sunk off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. As the divers studied further, they recognized that the current assessment by German naval historian Axel Niestlé—that
U-879
had been sunk off Cape Hatteras—was correct. But the lesson was stark and by now familiar: written history was fallible. Sloppy and erroneous assessments had been rushed into the official record, only to be presumed accurate by historians, who then published elegant reference works echoing the mistakes. Unless a person was willing, as Chatterton and Kohler were, to ditch work and sneak off to Washington, chisel away at mountains of opaque original documents, sleep in fleabag motels, eat street-vendor hot dogs, and run outside every two hours to shovel quarters into a parking meter, he would presume the history books to be correct. As they left Washington for New Jersey that night, Chatterton and Kohler celebrated their detective work—original research that virtually proved that the
U-Who
was
U-857.
Along the way, each marveled at how easy it was to get an incomplete picture of the world if one relied solely on experts, and how important it would be to further rely on oneself.
Now armed with abundant evidence that their wreck was
U-857,
Chatterton and Kohler determined to use the rest of the 1992–93 off-season to complete the proof.
For his part, Chatterton placed a classified ad in
Proceedings
magazine, a publication of the U.S. Naval Institute, seeking information on the sinking of
U-857
by the USS
Gustafson.
Several
Gustafson
crewmen, now in their seventies, replied to the ad. Chatterton interviewed them about the day they attacked the U-boat off Boston. While the accomplishment had been a source of lifelong pride, none could offer any more evidence of the sinking today than they had in 1945. They had fired Hedgehogs and smelled oil. And that was it.
Chatterton did not have the heart to inform these men, soldiers who had gone to hunt U-boats in defense of America, that the sinking of which they had been proud for so long had likely never happened.
During one interview, a crewman invited Chatterton to their upcoming “Greasy Gus” reunion. He asked Chatterton to speak about his research. As Chatterton considered the invitation, he was struck by the oddest thought. He had run to fallen men in Vietnam bulletstorms. He had swum under a thousand pounds of dangling steel inside a crushed submarine. But contemplating speaking before these elderly men at their celebration, he found himself afraid. He felt sure that he could not attend their reunion and tell these men that the story they had told their grandchildren about sinking the U-boat was wrong, that history had been mistaken, that the Greasy Gus had missed. Chatterton thanked the crewman for the invitation but told him he would be unable to attend.
For his part, Kohler set out in search of the grandmaster of U-boat knowledge. For decades, Robert Coppock had been caretaker to Britain’s U-boat records—including captured German records—and he still worked for the Ministry of Defence in London. According to an archivist Kohler had met, no one had a more comprehensive understanding of U-boat records than did Coppock. And no one had deeper connections into the sometimes murky world of U-boat historians, thinkers, and theorists.