Shadow Divers

by Robert Kurson

In the tradition of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger's
The Perfect Storm comes a true tale of riveting adventure in which two
weekend scuba divers risk everything to solve a great historical
mystery--and make history themselves.

For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck , diving was more
than a sport.  Testing themselves against treacherous currents, braving
depths that induced hallucinatory effects, navigating through wreckage
as perilous as a minefield, they pushed themselves to their limits and
beyond, brushing against death more than once in the rusting hulks of
sunken ships.

But in the fall of 1991, not even these courageous divers were
prepared for what they found 230 feet below the surface, in the frigid
Atlantic waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey: a World War II
German U-boat, its ruined interior a macabre wasteland of twisted
metal, tangled wires, and human bones-all buried under decades of
accumulated sediment.

No identifying marks were visible on the submarine or the few artifacts
that Chatterton and Kohler brought to the surface.  No historian,
expert, or government had a clue as to which U-boat the men had found.
In fact, the official records all agreed that there simply could not be
a sunken U-boat and crew at that location.  Over the next six years, an
elite team of divers embarked on a quest to solve the mystery.  Some of
them would not live to see its end.

Chatterton and Kohler, at first bitter rivals, would be drawn into a
friendship that deepened to an almost mystical bond of brotherhood, with
each other and with the drowned U-boat sailors- former enemies of their
country.  As the men's marriages frayed under the pressure of a shared
obsession, their dives grew more daring, and each realized that he was
hunting more than the identities of a lost U-boat and its nameless
crew.

Author Robert Kurson's account of this quest is at once thrilling,
emotionally complex, and written with a vivid sense of what divers
actually experience when they counter the dangers of the ocean's
underworld.  The story of Shadow Divers often seems too amazing to be
true, but it all happened 230 feet down, in the deep

ROBERT KURSON earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the
University of Wisconsin, then a law degree from Harvard Law School.
After working as a features writer for the Chicago Sun-Times and
Chicago magazine, he moved to Esquire as a contributing editor.  His
award-winning stories have also appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York
Times Magazine, and other publications.  He lives in the Chicago
suburbs and can be reached via the Internet at www.robertkurson.com.
Also available from Random House Audio and in a Random House Large
Print Edition

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Printed: 2004

SHADOW DIVERS

The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One
of the Last Mysteries of World War II

the answer to my life's search

Copyright 2004 by Robert Kurson and U-869 Partnership

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The
Random House

Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc."  New York, and
simultaneously in

Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

RANDOM House and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House,
Inc.

Title-page art: Dan Crowell

Illustration on page xii copyright David Lindroth, Inc.  Library of
Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kurson, Robert.

Shadow divers: the true adventure of two Americans who risked
everything to solve one of the last mysteries of World War II / by
Robert Kurson p. cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-375-50858-9

1. U-869 (Submarine).  2. Excavations (Archaeology)-New Jersey.  3.
Nagle, Bill, 1952-1993.  4. Chatterton, John.  5. World War,
1939-1945-Naval operations-Submarine.  6. World War, 1939-1945-Naval
operations, German.  7. Shipwrecks- New Jersey.  8. Underwater
archaeology-New Jersey.  9. Deep diving-New Jersey.

I. Title.

VA515.U158K87 2004 940.54'51-dc22 2003060362

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Random House
website address: wwwatrandom.com 4 6 8 9 7 5

For Nate, already a seeker

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its
fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off.  It is
there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf.  If you summon it
by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

-Franz Kafka, Diaries

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its
fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off.  It is
there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf.  If you summon it
by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

-Franz Kafka, Diaries

AUTHOR'S NOTE

A few years ago, a friend told me a remarkable story.  Two recreational
scuba divers had recently discovered a World War II German U-boat off
the New Jersey coast.  The fifty-six-man crew was still aboard.  No
government, expert, historian, or navy had a clue as to which submarine
it was, who the sailors were, or why it was in New Jersey.

My first reaction was that the story sounded too amazing to be true.
Still, it awakened childhood memories in me.  For years, my grade
school classes had taken field trips to Chicago's Museum of Science and
Industry to see its two centerpiece exhibits: a working coal mine and
U-50S, a German U-boat captured in 1944.  Most kids preferred the coal
mine, which featured moving cars and live explosions.  I was drawn to
the submarine.  This eel-shaped fighting machine, with its furious
interior of pipes and wire and gauges and weapons, seemed more
terrifying than any bomber plane or Sherman tank.  Seeing it resting
there, just yards from the banks of Lake Michigan, I imagined this
invisible hunter stalking the shoreline where I swam.  This U-boat, I
thought, could have come to within a mile or two of my house.

I called John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, the two New Jersey divers,
and asked if I might fly out to hear their story.  We met at Chatterton's house, where he had parked his vintage Royal Enfield motorcycle next
to Kohler's late-model Harley.  Chatterton was a commercial
diver who did underwater construction jobs around Manhattan.  Kohler
owned a glass-repair business.  They dove for shipwrecks on weekends.
Each seemed, in every respect, a regular guy.

I promised not to take much of their time.  Fourteen hours later, I was
still listening.  They told of discovering not just a U-boat but
mystery, adventure, high-seas rivalries and bitter feuds, and
membership in an obsessed culture of immensely brave men.  They also
told me of an intellectual odyssey, one in which they had made
themselves into expert researchers, pored over original documents,
learned bits of German, hunted clues abroad, constructed original
theories, challenged professional historians, and ultimately rewritten
a page of history long presumed to be gospel.

"Sounds like a novel, huh?"  Kohler said to me in his thick Brooklyn
accent as he fired up his Harley.  Driving to the airport that night, I
could scarcely believe my luck.  In Chatterton and Kohler, I had found
two ordinary men who had confronted an extraordinarily dangerous world
and solved a historical mystery that even governments had not been able
to budge.  Any one of the elements of their story raised intriguing
possibilities.  Taken together, they made for a once-in-a-lifetime
writing opportunity.  I could no more turn my back on a chance to write
the divers' story than they could have turned their backs on the chance
to identify the mystery U-boat.  In that sense, Chatterton, Kohler, and
I already had something in common.

So this is their story.  All of it is true and accurate.  Nothing is
imagined or interpreted, and no literary liberties have been taken. The
book is rooted in hundreds of hours of interviews with Chatterton and
Kohler, plus countless more hours with divers, historians, experts,
relatives, and other witnesses to the events described herein.
Dialogue-even that from World War II-is taken directly from interviews
I conducted with people who were there and witnessed the events.
Everything was checked against multiple sources whenever possible.

While researching the dangers of deep-shipwreck diving, I was struck by
a remark the divers made about depth.  The mystery U-boat, they said,
lay in such deep, dark waters that occasionally they could do little
more than dive at shadows.  It occurred to me then that there were
shadows cast throughout the story-by the fallen crewmen, by World War II, by the seeming infallibility of
written history, by questions the divers came to ask about themselves
as men.  For six years, Chatterton and Kohler were shadow divers.  For
six years, they went on a remarkable journey.  I wrote this book to
take you there with them.

Type IXC U-boat

--air jEBh:.

Aft torpedo tubes

Aft torpedo room

Electric motor room

Diesel motor room

Periscopes

Schnorkel

Forward torpedo tube

Control ,

Captain's

Petty room quarters officers'

and room

officers'

wardroom

Forward torpedo room and crew's quarters

SHADOW DIVERS

CHAPTER ONE

THE BOOK OF NUMBER

Brielle, New Jersey, September 1991

BILL NAGLE's LIFE CHANGED the day a fisherman sat beside him in
a ramshackle bar and told him about a mystery he had found lying at the
bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.^Against his better judgment, that fisherman promised to tell Nagle how to find it.  The men agreed to meet the
next day on the rickety wooden pier that led to Nagle's boat, the Seeke
a vessel Nagle had built to chase possibility.  But when the appointe
time came, the fisherman was not there.  Nagle paced back and forth
careful not to plunge through the pier where its wooden planks had
rotted away.  He had lived much of his life on the Atlantic, and he
knew when worlds were about to shift.  Usually, that happened before
a storm or when a man's boat broke.  Today, however, he knew it was going
to happen when the fisherman handed him a scrap of paper, with a hand-scrawled
set of numbers that would lead to the sunken mystery.  Nagle looked into
the distance for the fisherman.  He saw no one.  The salt air blew
against the small seashore town of Brielle, tilting the dock side boats
and spraying the Atlantic into Nagle's eyes.  When the wind died down he
looked again.  This time, he saw the fisherman approaching a small
square of paper crumpled in his hands.  The fisherman looked worried.
Like Nagle, he had lived on the ocean, and he also knew when a man's
life was about to change.

In the whispers of approaching autumn, Brielle's rouge is blown away
and what remains is the real Brielle, the locals' Brielle.  This small
seashore town on the central New Jersey coast is the place where the
boat captains and fishermen live, where convenience store owners stay
open to serve neighbors, where fifth graders can repair scallop
dredges.  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.

The Seeker towers above the other boats tied to this Brielle dock, and
it's not just the vessel's sixty-five-foot length that grabs one's
attention, it's the feeling-from her battered wooden hull and nicked
propellers-that she's been places.  Conceived in Nagle's imagination,
the Seeker was built for a single purpose: to take scuba divers to the
most dangerous shipwrecks in the Atlantic Ocean.

Nagle was forty years old then, a thin, deeply tanned former Snap-On
Tools Salesman of the Year.  To see him here, waiting for this
fisherman in his tattered T-shirt and thrift-shop sandals, the Jim Beam
he kept as best friend slurring his motions, no one would guess that he
had been an artist, that in his day Nagle had been great.

In his twenties, Nagle was already legend in shipwreck diving, a boy
wonder in a sport that regularly kills its young.  In those days,
deep-wreck diving was still the province of the adventurer.  Countless
shipwrecks, even famous ones, lay undiscovered at the bottom of the
Atlantic, and the hunt for those wrecks-with their bent metal and
arrested history-was the motion that primed Nagle's imagination.

Treasure never figured into the equation for Atlantic shipwreck divers
in the Northeast.  Spanish galleons overflowing with gold doubloons and
silver pieces of eight did not sink in this part of the ocean, and even
if they had, Nagle wouldn't have been interested.  His neighborhood was
the New York and New Jersey shipping lanes, waters that conducted
freighters, ocean liners, passenger vessels, and warships about the
business and survival of America.  These wrecks occasionally
surrendered a rare piece of china or jewelry, but Nagle and his kind were looking for something different.  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.

And they did it to explore.  Many of the deep wrecks hadn't been seen
since their victims last looked at them, and would remain lost while
nature pawed at them until they simply didn't exist anymore.  In a
world where even the moon had been traveled, the floor of the Atlantic
remained uncharted wilderness, its shipwrecks beacons for men compelled
to look.

You had to have steel balls to do what Nagle did in his heyday.  In the
1970s and 1980s, scuba equipment was still rudimentary, not much
advanced past 1943, when Jacques Cousteau helped invent the system of
tanks and regulators that allowed men to breathe underwater.  Even at
130 feet, the recreational limit suggested by most scuba training
organizations, a minor equipment failure could kill the most skilled
practitioner.  In searching for the most interesting wrecks, Nagle and
the sport's other kings might descend to 200 feet or deeper, virtually
begging the forces of nature to flick them into the afterlife,
practically demanding their biology to abandon them.  Men
died-often-diving the shipwrecks that called to Nagle.

Even if Nagle's equipment and body could survive the deep Atlantic, he
faced a smorgasbord of other perils, each capable of killing him a la
carte.  For starters, the sport was still new; there was no ancient
wisdom to be passed from father to son, the kind of collective
experience that routinely keeps today's divers alive.  The sport's
cautionary tales, those lifelines learned over beers with buddies and
by reading magazines and attending classes, were beaten into Nagle
underwater at anti human depths.  If Nagle found himself in some crazy,
terrible circumstance-and there were countless of them on these deep
wrecks-odds were that he would be the one who would tell the first
tale.  When he and his ilk survived, the magazines wrote articles about
them.

Nagle pushed deeper.  Diving below 200 feet, he began doing things
scientists didn't fully understand, going places recreational

divers had never been.  When he penetrated a shipwreck at these depths,
he was often among the first to see the vessel since it had gone down,
the first to open the purser's safe since it had been closed, the first
to look at these men since they had been lost at sea.  But this also
meant that Nagle was on his own.  He had no maps drawn by earlier
divers.  Had someone visited these wrecks before, he might have told
Nagle, "Don't brush against that outboard beam in the galley-the thing
moved when I swam by, and the whole room might cave in and bury you if
you do."  Nagle had to discover all this by himself.  It is one thing,
wreck divers will tell you, to slither in near-total darkness through a
shipwreck's twisted, broken mazes, each room a potential trap of
swirling silt and collapsing structure.  It is another to do so without
knowing that someone did it before you and lived.

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.  A single bad experience on a shipwreck could reroute all
but the hardiest souls to more sensible pursuits.  Early divers like
Nagle had bad experiences every day.  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.  They thought nothing of whipping out a sledgehammer
and beating a porthole from the side of a ship, even as their heavy
breath hastened nitrogen narcosis, the potentially deadly buildup of
that otherwise benign gas in their brains.  Underwater, rules of
possession bent with the light; some divers cut prizes from the mesh
goody bags of other divers, following the motto "He who floats it owns
it."  Fistfights-aboard boats and even underwater-often settled
disputes.  Artifacts recovered from wrecks were guarded like firstborn
children, occasionally at knife point  In this way, early deep-wreck
divers had a measure of pirate in their blood.

But not Nagle.  In the sport's brawniest era, he was a man of the mind.
He devoured academic texts, reference works, novels, blueprints, any
material he could uncover on historical ships, until he could have
stood in the dockyards of a dozen eras and built the boats alongside
the workers.  He was a connoisseur of the parts, and

he reveled in the life force a boat took on from the interlocking of
its pieces.  This insight gave Nagle two-way vision; as much as he
understood the birth of a ship, he also understood its death.  Ordinary
divers would come upon a shipwreck and see the melange of bent steel
and broken wood, the shock of pipe and wire as a cacophony of crap, an
impediment that might be hiding a compass or some other prize.  They
would plant their noses in a random spot and dig like puppies, hoping
to find a morsel.  Viewing the same scene, Nagle repaired the broken
parts in his mind and saw the ship in its glory.  One of his greatest
finds was a four-foot-tall brass whistle from the paddle wheeler
Champion, a proud voice that had been mounted on the ship's mast and
powered by a steam line.  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.  After Nagle
recovered two helms from the British tanker Coimbra in ajingle day
(finding one helm once in a career was rare enough), his photograph was
hung-alongside that of Lloyd Bridges-in the wheelhouse of the Sea
Hunter, a leading dive charter boat of the time.  He was twenty-five.

To Nagle, the value in artifacts like the brass steam whistle lay not
in their aesthetics or their monetary worth but in their symbolism.  It
is an odd sight to see grown men covet teacups and saucers, and build
noble display cases to these dainty relics.  But to divers like Nagle
these trinkets represented exploration, going off the charts.  A
telegraph on display in a diver's living room, therefore, is much more
than a shiny object; it is an announcement.  It says, If someone had
been to this ship's wheelhouse before me, he would not have left this
telegraph behind.

It was only time before Nagle's instinct delivered him to the Andrea
Doria, the Mount Everest of shipwrecks.  The grand Italian passenger
liner had collided with the Stockholm, a Swedish liner, in dense fog
off Nantucket Island in 1956.  Fifty-one people died; 1,659 were
rescued before the liner sank and settled on her side at a depth of 250
feet.  The Doria was not a typical target for Nagle.

Her location was widely known, and she had been explored by divers
since the day after her sinking.  But the Doria made siren calls to
great wreck divers.  She was brimming with artifacts even after all
these years: serving sets made of fine Italian china and painted with
the ship's legendary Italia logo, silver utensils, luggage, ceramic
tiles by famed artists, pewter sherbet dishes, jewelry, signs.  In
Nagle's day, and even today, a diver could explore the Doria and worry
only about having enough stamina to lug home the prizes he recovered.

Had the Doria only her riches to offer, she could not have romanced
Nagle so hopelessly.  The ship's real challenge lay in exploration. The
wreck rested on its side, making navigation dangerous and deceptive.  A
diver had to conceive the world sideways to make sense of doors on the
floor and ceilings to the right.  And she was deep-180 feet at her
shallowest and 250 feet where she crushed the ocean floor. Men
sometimes got disoriented or ran out of air or lost their minds from
narcosis and died on the Doria.  The wreck was so deep, dark, and
dangerous that decades after her sinking, entire decks remained
unexplored.  Those decks were Nagle's destinations.

Over time, Nagle penetrated the wreck in places long relegated to the
impossible.  His mantel at home became a miniature Doria museum.  Soon,
he set his sights on the bell.  A ship's bell is her crown, her voice.
For a diver, there is no greater prize, and many of the greats go a
career without coming close to recovering one.  Nagle decided to own
the Doria's bell.  People thought he was nuts- scores of divers had
searched for thirty years for the Doria's bell.  No one believed it was
there.

Nagle went to work.  He studied deck plans, books of photographs, crew
diaries.  Then he did what few other divers did: he formulated a plan.
He would need days, maybe even a week to pull it off.  No charter boat,
however, was going to take a diver to the Doria for a week.  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.

That boat was the original Seeker, a thirty-five-foot Maine Coaster
built in New Jersey by Henrique.  In 1985, Nagle recruited five top
divers, men who shared his passion for exploration, and he

made this arrangement: He would take the group to the Doria at his
expense.  The trip would be a dedicated one, meaning the divers went
with just one objective-to recover the bell.

For the first few days on the wreck, the divers stuck to Nagle's plan.
They found nothing.  The bell just wasn't there.  At that point, even
the hardiest divers would have turned back.  A single day on the open
Atlantic in a sixty-five-foot boat will turn intestines inside out;
Nagle and his cohorts had been out for four days in a thirty-five-foot
glorified bathtub.  But a man is not so inclined to give up when he
sees in panoramas.  Nagle abandoned the bow of the Doria, where he and
his team had been searching, and rerouted to the stern.  They would now
be flying by the seat of their pants, an improvisation on the deadliest
wreck in the Atlantic.  No one had ever been to the stern.  Yet by
conceiving the Doria as a single, breathing organism rather than as
detached, twenty-foot chunks of wood and steel, Nagle and the others
allowed themselves to look in unlikely places.

On the fifth day they hit pay dirt-there was the Andrea Doria's bell.
The men rigged it, beat out the bell's pin with a sledgehammer, and
sent up the prize on a heavy-duty lift bag.  Shock waves rippled
through the diving community.  According to their agreement, Nagle
owned half the bell, and the other five men owned half; the last man
living among them would own it outright.  Nagle placed the 150-pound
bell into the back of his wife's station wagon and asked her to drive
it home.  When she arrived, the bell wasn't there anymore.  She called
Nagle, saying, "I don't know what happened to the bell!"  Nagle nearly
suffered a heart attack.  He called the highway patrol and asked, "Did
anyone find a giant bell anywhere?"  Someone had, in fact, made a
report, telling the police something like "I found something and I
don't know what it is, but it looks like a big bell and it says Andrea
Doria."  Nagle almost had another attack.  He retrieved the bell and
insured it for $100,000.  He was among the immortals.

Soon an idea began percolating in Nagle's imagination.  What if he
could run the Seeker full-time as a charter boat for divers?  That
would allow him to earn a living doing what he loved most.  "I want to
be the guy that turns this into a career," he told friends.  He could
make a half dozen trips to the Doria every year, then use his free time
to search for the Carolina, Texel, Norness, and Pan Pennsylvania

great ships still missing decades after sinking.  His wife and two
children lived in Pennsylvania, but he resided in Brielle now; he dated
other women and kept a bachelor pad, yet his wife held out hope that he
would return someday, and she raised his kids to admire him, so that he
could do this now, he could make this business happen.  He commissioned
a second Seeker, this one nearly double the length of the first.  It
would be outfitted to transport divers to the great wrecks, the ones
that required a pioneer's heart.

Almost immediately, Nagle struggled with the business.  It wasn't that
he lacked for customers.  It was that he couldn't abide the customers.
This was the wrong problem to have in the charter-boat business.  On a
dive trip, the captain's real job is to schmooze his patrons; at the
end of the day, what the weekend, bread-and-butter customer really
wants is to bond with a man of the sea.  Nagle had envisioned his
business as an endless series of trips to deep and dangerous wrecks
like the Doria or the Choapa.  But his patrons desired only the easy,
nearby sites, wrecks like the Stolt Dagali, SS Mohawk, and the Tolten.
To Nagle, these people weren't divers, they were tourists.  He watched
them climb onto the Seeker with their brand-new lime green fins-lime
green!-and listened to their giddy plans to take pictures of lobsters
or touch the side of a "real" shipwreck, and he could not hide his
contempt for them.  He had established a business in order to explore,
and now he was beholden to customers who were thrilled precisely
because they didn't have to.

And Nagle was drinking.  Jim Beam didn't like the Seeker's customers
any more than Nagle did.  Before long, Nagle became surly with his
clients.  Often, he stood outside the wheelhouse atop his boat and
rained down commentary on stunned customers.  He'd shout, "This isn't
what diving's about!"  or "Look at you greenhorns- go to the Caribbean
with those green fins!"  or "You dive shop guys got balls selling that
garbage equipment to these innocents-you're crooks!"  At the end of a
trip, after he'd been drinking for hours, he might say, "Get these
fucking cattle off my boat!"  Friends and crew pleaded with Nagle:
"Bill, for Christ's sake, you can't talk that way to paying customers.
This is a business!"  Nagle didn't care.  This wasn't what diving was
about.

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.  The 150-foot depth
of the new wreck was beyond the abilities of the divers on board.  The
man who had chartered the boat was incensed.  "What the hell are you
doing, Bill?  We're supposed to go to a hundred-foot wreck.  My guys
can't handle this kind of depth."  Nagle growled, "You gotta teach
these guys to do decompression diving!"  then stormed into the
wheelhouse.  And that was it.  Nagle went where he wanted-he was no
goddamn taxi driver, he was no sellout, he would not betray the spirit
of diving.  But as the 1980s gave way to a new decade, Nagle's drinking
began to bleach the greatness of his skills.  His shoulder blades
became spires on his emaciated frame, his jaundiced skin and stringy
hair a goulash of self-abandon.  He still swam beautifully, somehow, in
the way retired baseball greats still throw gracefully at old-timers'
games.  But experienced divers noticed that his Doria dives had become
less strenuous, that he wasn't quite going anymore where no man had
been.  "Ah, I just gotta get in shape," he'd grumble to his few close
friends, which they took as code for "I gotta stop drinking."  By 1990,
Nagle had made his last Doria dive-you couldnT challenge a wreck like
that without every ounce of your faculties tuned high, and there had
been recent corpses aboard the Doria to prove it.  Nagle continued to
lose customers.  Every day, he told the few remaining people he
respected about how right things had been in the old days, in the days
when diving was great.

This was Nagle's life and business in the late summer of 1991, as
Brielle shut down for the season and returned to the rhythms of its
regulars.  Nagle had spent much of this August day washing the Seeker
and contemplating his life.  Now, with the sun setting, he took a short
walk across the dock, through the cratered, dirt parking lot, and into
an establishment seemingly placed there for him by God.  The Harbor Inn
was open late year-round.  It served Jim Beam.  Nagle was thirsty.

No one quite recalls when they started calling it the Horrible Inn, but
everyone can tell you why.  Hard-core smokers choked on the mushroom cloud of cigarette smoke that hovered over the bar.  Bathroom
smells wafted with impunity into the small grill area.  Skin stuck to
everything.  Drunken fishermen painted the names of sweethearts onto
greasy walls.  Once, the owner decided to water-blast off years of
built-up nicotine.  A fully rigged crew showed up.  They turned on the
hoses.  The water blew holes through the wall.

And there was the clientele.  The Horrible Inn didn't serve many, but
its faithful were hard-core and local.  Bikers, fishermen, street
toughs, boat mechanics, deep-wreck divers-this was the constant,
unshaven dance card at the Horrible Inn.  These men-you didn't dare
bring a lady here-weren't interested in pinball machines or pool
tables, and they didn't question management's policy to refill peanut
dishes with leftovers from other peanut dishes.  Customers drank beer
and booze from plastic cups, then extinguished their cigarettes in
same.  Fights erupted.  Nagle never budged from the Horrible Inn. Once,
word spread through Brielle that a bartender had thrown Nagle out of
the Horrible Inn for indecent behavior.  No one believed it.  It wasn't
the idea of Nagle misbehaving that seemed impossible to the town; it
was the idea that anyone could do anything indecent enough to warrant
expulsion from such a place.

This evening, Nagle took his usual place at the bar and ordered a Jim
Beam.  And then another.  A half hour later, a thirty-eight-year-old
fishing boat captain with a dirty shirt ambled into the Horrible Inn to
pay his fuel bill.  Everyone knew the man as Skeets.  Skeets had been
around the dock for years and tied up his boat just a few slips from
the Seeker.  His business was small-he took out only four or five
fishermen at a time-but he ran it well, which in the charter fishing
trade meant two things: he knew where the fish were; and he knew how to
keep his mouth shut.

Finding fish, of course, was critical.  Customers who chartered fishing
boats didn't come back if a captain took them to the desert.  Guys like
Skeets had to be able to sniff the air, look at the sky, and say,
"Gentlemen, today I smell tuna."  And then the captain had to take them
there, to little sites recorded in tattered notebooks stashed in
wheelhouse bottom drawers.  Sometimes, this meant a location along the
beach; other times, it meant a long journey offshore to one of the
canyons.  Most often, it meant a trip to the shipwrecks.

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.  Tiny creatures attach themselves to solid objects.  Those
creatures attract predators, which in turn attract their own predators,
and so on.  Soon the wreck has become its own ecosystem.  The
pelagics-open-water traveling fish like tuna, codfish, and
pollack-visit and get fat.  Fishing boat captains get fatter.  Keeping
your mouth shut was essential.  Every fishing charter captain kept a
book of public wrecks, the ones everyone knew and cleaned out
regularly.  But it was the secret wrecks that mattered, and the secret
wrecks made the captain.  Over the course of his career, a good fishing
charter captain like Skeets might build a repertoire of a dozen
shipwrecks known just to himself and a handful of others.  He might
discover some by scanning his bottom finder for sudden humps while out
at sea.  He might be gifted a prime location by a retiring fisherman to
whom he had been kind.  He might even trade sites with another captain
he trusted.  The more wrecks he knew, the more money he made.  The more
secret wrecks he knew, the more customers coveted his boat.

Fishing charter captains protected their secret sites.  Customers were
forbidden to bring aboard navigation equipment or even to enter the
wheelhouse, lest they stumble upon a site's coordinates.  If a captain
spotted another boat while fishing, he would pull up his anchor, move
off the site, and wait until the potential spy had passed.  If another
boat shadowed him out of port, he might zigzag into the middle of
nowhere, then fish for nothing until the spy slipped away.  All the
time, he had to stay sharp or he risked his livelihood.  They still
talk about a captain from the Viking Fleet in Montauk.  The man charged
a fortune to take two brothers fishing.  When he fell asleep, the
brothers tiptoed inside the wheelhouse and videotaped his book of
numbers.  A year later, that captain's golden sites were Grand Central
Station.

For the last few years, Skeets had been fishing a once-in-a-lifetime
spot, a site about sixty miles off the Brielle coast.  He had come upon
the place one foggy day while trolling for tuna, a technique whereby a
fishing boat drags monofilament line and lures

through the water to mimic the movement of squid and other bait.
Because the fishing boat is moving while trolling, the captain must
keep alert for other boats in the vicinity.  In the fog, he does this
by scanning his radar.  Skeets scanned his radar.  Soon he spotted
another boat on the screen.  But its green blip never moved, meaning
that this boat was anchored.  To Skeets, that meant one thing-the boat
on his radar was fishing a shipwreck.

Skeets turned his boat hard to port, then set course for the anchored
boat.  Before that boat could respond, Skeets had "jumped it" and had
the numbers.  The boat turned out to belong to a friend.  The friend
radioed to Skeets: "Don't tell a soul about this site, Skeets.  Don't
ever tell a soul about any of this.  This one is special."  A few days
later, Skeets returned to the site, and the place was
glorious-fishermen needed only cast their hooks before schools of fat
tuna, sea bass, and cod leaped onto their lines.  The best part was
that only Skeets and his friend knew about it, which meant he could
visit anytime without worry that other captains had wiped out the
prize.

But a curious thing happened to Skeets whenever he visited this site.
Even as he basked in its largesse, he could not stop himself from
wondering about the object at the soul of this underwater bounty.  It
was big-that much he could see by the crude green blob the mass painted
on his bottom finder's screen.  It was deep-at least 190 feet.  And it
was made of steel; he could tell that by inspecting the rust flakes
that sometimes stuck to his fishing lures.  Beyond that he could divine
nothing.  He was curious.  Something about this site pulled on his
instincts.  Over a lifetime at sea, a fisherman develops a feel for
what matters and what does not.  To Skeets, this site mattered.

For years, when Nagle had seen Skeets in the parking lot or washing his
boat or paying his fuel bill at the Horrible Inn, he had asked this
question: "Say, Skeets, you come across any wrecks out there that
haven't been hit by divers?"  For years, Skeets had given this answer:
"Sorry, Billy, nothing."  Today, however, Skeets looked over to Nagle
and said something different.

"Billy, I've been fishing this site.  You can't believe it.  Tuna.
Pollack.  Big fish."

Nagle raised an eyebrow from the bottom of his bourbon.  "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah, Bill.  About sixty miles offshore.  And deep, your kind of deep,
maybe two hundred foot of water.  Something's down there.  Something
big.  You should check this thing out.  I'm thinking something really
big is down there."

Even after several Jim Beams, Nagle knew the difference between
dockside chest-puffing and a man's heart.  He considered Skeets an
excellent captain and a man who knew his ocean.  He didn't doubt that
Skeets's instinct was pinging properly.  Still, Nagle could not and
would not request the numbers.  Captains had only their reputations,
and it would be the reddest violation of professional territory to
ask.

Skeets made an offer.  "Billy, I'm looking for a little inshore
black-fish wreck I know you dive every so often.  Give me those
numbers, and I'll give you my numbers.  But you gotta keep them to
yourself.  You can't tell anyone."

Nagle nodded.

The two men agreed to exchange the numbers the next day on Nagle's
boat.  That night, Nagle could not sleep in anticipation of the
appointment.  The next day, he arrived an hour early and paced the
rotted wooden pier that led to the Seeker.  His instincts throbbed
through his body.  This meeting was about more than just an object at
the bottom of the ocean.  This meeting was about the tides turning.

When Skeets finally arrived, Nagle invited him into the Seeker's
wheelhouse.  The men stood in the tiny compartment, surrounded by
hanging navigation equipment, a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam, and the
crumpled cowboys-and-Indians sleeping bag Nagle had used since boyhood.
They looked each other in the eye.

"Bill, I gotta tell you something," Skeets said.  "This site I found is
a bad place.  This part of the ocean is a bad place, it's a dangerous
place.  It's in a little depression, there's an edge there, with a huge
current coming up over the continental shelf, lots of moving water-"

"Ah, don't worry, Skeets-"

"Really, Billy, it's a bad place.  Your guys gotta be top-shelf
divers.

You can have dead-calm air and still water, and still the boat could be
drifting at three knots.  You know what that means, how dangerous the
currents are underneath.  And it's deep.  I'm thinking two hundred
feet.  I don't know anything about diving, but you better watch your
guys."

"Yeah, Skeets, I know, I know.  Don't worry.  Let's swap the
numbers."

Neither man could find a clean piece of paper.  Nagle reached into his
pocket and pulled out two cocktail napkins from the Horrible Inn.  He
wrote down his numbers for Skeets-a little blackfish snag south of
Seaside lump, just a pile of rocks that made for good fishing.  Then
Skeets began to copy his Loran-C time differentials across a streak of
peanut grease left by Nagle's hand.  Captains are not supposed to
reveal prize sites.  But Nagle could tell Skeets what was down there;
Nagle was the one guy Skeets knew who was capable of diving to 200
feet.  And Nagle seemed a decent guy, not the kind to blab or sell the
numbers to a rival fishing charter.

Skeets handed over the napkin.

"Keep it to yourself," he reminded Nagle.  "And for God's sake, be
careful."

Skeets let himself out of the wheelhouse, climbed down the steep white
wooden stairs, and returned to the dock and his boat.  Nagle followed a
short time later, pen in one hand, cocktail napkin death-gripped in the
other.  He walked to the Horrible Inn and ordered a Jim Beam, then
began transcribing Skeets's numbers into code on a different napkin.
Nagle kept a book of numbers on the Seeker, but those were public
numbers-go steal them if you want, you son of a bitch.  His wallet,
however, was reserved for promise.  You could kill Nagle and steal his
wallet, but those numbers would mean nothing without the code, and
Nagle never told anyone the code.  He folded the new napkin and tucked
it into his wallet, the safe house for his dreams.  Then he called John
Chatterton.

If Nagle saw himself in any other diver, that diver was John
Chatterton, a ruggedly tall and handsome forty-year-old commercial
diver whose booming, Long Island-speckled voice had become

sound track to the most important wreck dives of the era.  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.

They had met in 1984 aboard the Seeker.  Chatterton had no particular
interest in the destination that day; he had signed up simply to
observe Nagle, the legend.  Soon after, Chatterton took a Seeker
charter to the Texas Tower, an old air force radar installation about
sixty miles offshore.  The tower had collapsed in a 1961 storm, killing
its crew.  Its bottom lay jackknifed in sand at 200 feet, making it too
dangerous for all but the most accomplished divers.  But its top could
be easily explored at 85 feet, appropriate for every diver on this
trip.

One man got cocky.  He already had a reputation as a hotshot, so he
surprised no one by concocting a plan to dive the bottom.  Soon enough,
one of wreck diving's oldest songs sounded from beneath the waves.  The
man became obsessed with removing a brass window.  His air was short
but he tried to finish anyway.  He drowned.  That's how fast it happens
at those depths.

Now there was a corpse on the bottom of a very dangerous wreck. Someone
had to go get him.  That was Nagle's job; ordinarily, he or one of his
assistants-his mates-would make the recovery dive.  But they had just
completed their own dives and could not return to the water until their
bodies had off-gassed built-up nitrogen, a process that would take
hours.

Chatterton volunteered.  A diver unfamiliar with the bottom could
easily get lost and never find his way back to the Seeker, so Nagle
asked if Chatterton knew the mangled topography of the wreck.  "Not
really, but I'll go anyway," Chatterton said.  That answer spoke to
Nagle.

Chatterton reached the bottom of the Texas Tower and began his
reconnaissance.  Soon enough, he found the diver-"Doesn't look too bad
for a dead guy," Chatterton thought.  He tied the man's tanks to a
two-hundred-pound lift bag and inflated the bag with air until

the body began its ascent to the surface.  For good measure, he tied a
spool of line from the corpse to the shipwreck; that way, if anything
went wrong, there would still be a trail to the body.

Something went wrong.  During ascent, the rapidly decreasing water
pressure caused the air in the diver's dry suit to expand, turning him
into a deceased version of the Michelin Man.  As the body surfaced, a
giant wave collapsed the lift bag, and the man sank back to the bottom.
With nightfall approaching, it would be unsafe for anyone to dive
again.

Chatterton volunteered to retrieve the body in the morning.  That
really spoke to Nagle.  The Seeker stayed overnight; everyone ate
Doritos for breakfast.  Chatterton found the body again.  This time,
the poor guy didn't look so good.  His eyelids had been eaten away and
his teeth showed; he'd become what divers call a "creature feature."
Nagle reeled in the body when it surfaced.  "You did a good job," he
told Chatterton.  "You are a good diver."  After that, Nagle and
Chatterton were friends.

Before long, Chatterton was crewing on the Seeker.  In 1987, he made
his first trip to the Doria.  He swam around but did nothing more.  The
wreck was so dangerous, so terrifying, that he vowed never to return.
On the same trip, Nagle recovered a two-hundred-pound wooden sign that
read KEEP CLEAR OF PROPELLERS, the most beautiful sign Chatterton had
ever seen.  He shook Nagle's hand, thanked him for the opportunity, and
said, "Bill, I've made my trip to the mountaintop.  Once is enough."
Nagle, however, knew better.

Chatterton couldn't forget the wreck.  In contemplating the Doria's
tilted grandness, he could glimpse shadows of the secrets great
shipwrecks offer those who see with their minds.  He returned.  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.  Soon, the Doria ran
through his bloodstream full-time.  Raking leaves or watching a Giants
football game or walking the grocery's dairy aisle, Chatterton stitched
together his experiences on the Doria, and gradually his eyes adjusted,
until the quilt of his separate experiences aboard

that shipwreck formed a single picture in his mind.  "This is why I
dive," he told Nagle.  "This is what I want diving to be."

Soon Chatterton was going places and finding things on the Doria no one
had before, not even Nagle and his cohorts in the glory days.  His
reputation wafted across the bows of dive boats along the eastern
seaboard.  And he continued to absorb Nagle.  He marveled at Nagle's
instinct to see the big picture, to envision a ship as it had been in
its proudest moment, to study deck plans and captain's logs, to put
himself into the mind of the ship's navigator, to construct a dive plan
that envisioned the whole ship when only a tiny portion of it was
currently knowable.  He was astounded to bring up meaningless rusty
artifacts from hidden corners on the Doria only to have Nagle examine
them and divine exactly where he'd been.

Most of all, he and Nagle shared a philosophy.  To them, diving was
about exploration, about aiming for the everywhere of the unknown.
There were a lot of impossible places to go when the world was as big
as Chatterton and Nagle saw it, but for God's sake you had to try.  You
were required to try.  What were you doing alive, these men thought, if
you didn't go and try?

The day after Skeets revealed his secret, Nagle asked Chatterton to
meet him at the Seeker.  The men walked upstairs to the boat's
wheelhouse, where Nagle locked the door and related Skeets's story to
his friend.  What could be at the bottom of that site?  The men dealt
out the possibilities like solitaire cards.  Could it be a warship or a
war-era merchant vessel?  Almost impossible-military records indicated
little action in the area during either world war.  Could it be the
Corvallis, a ship reputedly sunk by Hollywood for a 1930s disaster
flick?  Faintly possible: it was thought that the film makers had
bothered to note only the most general location for their shoot, an
area that included Skeets's fishing site but also several hundred other
square miles of ocean.  How about a subway car?  Also vaguely
possible-New Jersey sunk them purposely to promote marine life, but
those locations had been reliably recorded.

Less romantic scenarios seemed more probable.  It might be a pile of
rocks.  It might be a worthless pipe barge.  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.  Nagle and Chatterton had been to plenty of
those.

But maybe, just maybe, it was something big.  Nagle proposed a plan. He
and Chatterton would organize a trip to the site.  Each would recruit
six top divers, guys who could survive a 200-foot plunge into the
unknown.  It would not be an easy journey-six hours each way in the
chill September air.  Each diver would pay one hundred dollars to cover
fuel and expenses.  There would be no promises.  Other diving captains
offered hush-hush trips to "virgin" sites, but these were always scams;
you'd get down there and find a recent diver's orange crowbar on some
junky fishing boat, and the captain would actually look you in the eye
and say, "Gee, fellas, I had no idea."  Not Nagle and Chatterton.  They
would pitch their trip the way they felt it: It's probably nothing,
men, but we have to try.

The trip was booked for Labor Day 1991.  Nagle and Chatterton called
every good diver they knew.  Nearly all of them refused the invitation.
Even some of the greats, guys who were supposed to be excited by
maybes, turned down the trip.  "I'd rather spend my money on a sure
thing instead of some wacky pie in the sky" was the standard regret.
One diver, Brian Skerry, told Chatterton, "You know what, man?  I was
born too late.  All the really cool wrecks have been found.  The age of
exploration for shipwrecks is over."  That's how it was in 1991.  Guys
wanted guarantees.  Nagle and Chatterton kept calling.

Finally, their lists exhausted, they found their twelfth diver.
Chatterton was incensed.  "Nobody wants to find anything new!  What the
hell's going on, Bill?"  Nagle, normally bombastic in the face of
caution, looked down at the red X's on his list of divers and said to
Chatterton, almost in whisper, "These guys don't have the heart for
wreck diving, John.  These guys just don't get it."

Just after midnight on September 2, 1991, while the rest of Brielle
slept, Nagle, Chatterton, and the twelve divers who had signed up

for the exploratory trip stuffed the Seeker with tanks, masks,
regulators, knives, flashlights, and bundles of other gear.  They faced
a six-hour ride to Skeets's numbers.  Some grabbed a bunk and went to
sleep.  Others hung around the changing table, catching up on one
another's lives and laughing about the folly of paying to chase a pile
of rocks.  At one A.M."  Nagle checked the sign-in sheet against the
passengers on board.  "Get all gear secured," he called to those still
awake, then walked up the stairs and into the wheelhouse.  Chatterton
gave the signal to switch from shore power to generator.  The lights in
the boat's salon flickered, then gave way to powerful quartzes that
bathed the back deck in white.  One of the divers pulled the power
leads and water feed from the dock and disconnected the shore-based
phone line.  Nagle lit the twin diesel engines, which danced to
protest-cough-grumble-POP-chum ... cough-grumble-POP-POP-POP-rrmmm-the
disruption of their slumber.

Chatterton pulled in lines.  "Bow line off!  Stern line hold ... hold
... hold ... okay!"  he called to Nagle, then slung the heavy ropes
onto the dock.  Now the Seeker was ready.  Nagle switched his
wheelhouse lights to dim red, checked his VHF.  radio single sideband
radio, Loran-C, and radar, and engaged the engines one at a time, the
choice method for coaxing a lady from her dock.  A few minutes later,
the Seeker was past the railroad drawbridge and nose up into the
Atlantic.  Most likely these men were chasing a garbage barge.  Most
likely the age of shipwreck exploration had passed.  But as the Brielle
dock faded behind them, Chatterton and Nagle saw possibilities on the
horizon, and for that moment the world was perfect and right.

CHAPTER TWO

DEEP-SHIPWRECK DIVING is among the world's most dangerous sports.  Few
other endeavors exist in which nature, biology, equipment, instinct,
and object conspire-without warning and from all directions-to so
completely attack a man's mind and disassemble his spirit.  Many dead
divers have been found inside shipwrecks with more than enough air
remaining to have made it to the surface.  It is not that they chose to
die, but rather that they could no longer figure out how to live.

The sport bears only passing resemblance to its cousin, the
resort-area, single-tank scuba familiar to the general public.  Safety
statistics are difficult to divine.  Deep-wreck divers make up a
minuscule percentage of the world's twenty million or so certified
scuba divers.  Their accidents barely blip on the excellent safety
record of a sport in which nearly all the participants stay in shallow
tropical waters, depend on partners for safety, and desire little more
than lovely scenery.  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.  If a deep-wreck diver stays in
the sport long enough, he will likely either come close to dying, watch
another diver die, or die himself.  There are times in this sport when
it is difficult to say which of the three outcomes is worst.

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 sports dangers.
They are his dangers, too, and in learning about them he will begin to
comprehend the deep-wreck diver and feel his stories.  He will
understand why capable men give up underwater.  He will know why most
people in the world would never consider chasing a fisherman's numbers
sixty miles out and 200 feet down into the middle of nowhere.

A deep-shipwreck diver breathing air confronts two primary dangers.
First, at depths greater than about 66 feet, his judgment and motor
skills can become impaired, a condition known as nitrogen narcosis.  As
he descends farther, the effects of narcosis become more pronounced.
Beyond 100 feet, where some of the best shipwrecks lie, he can be
significantly handicapped, yet he must perform feats and make decisions
upon which his life depends.

Second, should something go wrong, he cannot simply swim to the
surface.  A diver who has spent time in deep water must ascend
gradually, stopping at predetermined intervals to allow his body to
readjust to decreasing pressures.  He must do this even if he believes
himself to be suffocating or choking or dying.  Panicked divers who
bolt for "sunshine and seagulls" risk a case of decompression sickness,
or the "bends."  Severe bends can permanently handicap, paralyze, or
kill a person.  Divers who have witnessed the writhing, screaming agony
of a bad bends hit swear that they would rather suffocate and drown on
the bottom than surface after a long, deep dive without
decompressing.

Nearly all the myriad other dangers lying in wait for the deep-wreck
diver involve narcosis or decompression sickness.  Both narcosis and
decompression sickness are conditions born of pressure.  At sea level,
atmospheric pressure is roughly equal to the pressure inside the human
body.  Throwing Frisbees on the beach or riding a bus, we are said to
be at one atmosphere of pressure, or 14.7 pounds per square inch.  Life
feels normal at one atmosphere.  The air we breathe at sea level, which
is composed of 21 percent oxygen and 79

percent nitrogen, also enters our lungs at a pressure of one
atmosphere.  The oxygen nourishes our blood and tissue.  The nitrogen
is inert and doesn't do much of anything.

Things change in water.  Every 33 feet below the surface, the pressure
increases by one atmosphere.  A scuba diver chasing seahorses at 33
feet, therefore, is said to be at two atmospheres, or twice the
pressure he experienced at the surface.  He barely feels it.  But
something is going on in the air he breathes from his tanks.  While
that air is still made up of oxygen and nitrogen molecules in that
21:79 ratio, there are now twice as many of each of those molecules in
every lungful of air he breathes.  At three atmospheres, there are
three times as many oxygen and nitrogen molecules in his lungful of
air, and so on.

As the diver breathes underwater, the extra nitrogen molecules being
taken into his lungs don't just sit around as they do in a person on
land.  Instead, they dissolve into the bloodstream and travel into his
tissues-his flesh, joints, brain, spine, everywhere.  The longer and
deeper a diver stays underwater, the more nitrogen accumulates in those
tissues.

At a depth of around three atmospheres, or 66 feet, that accumulated
nitrogen begins to have a narcotizing effect on most divers.  That is
nitrogen narcosis.  Some compare the effects of narcosis to alcohol
intoxication, others to the twilight of a waking anesthetic, still
others to the fog of ether or laughing gas.  Symptoms are relatively
mild at shallower depths-judgment skews, motor skills dull, manual
dexterity suffers, peripheral vision narrows, emotions heighten.  As a
diver descends farther, the effects intensify.  At 130 feet, or about
five atmospheres, most divers will be impaired.  Some become all thumbs
and struggle to complete simple tasks, such as tying a knot; others
turn "dumb with the depth" and must talk themselves into believing what
they already know.  As a diver descends even deeper, say to 170 or 180
feet, he might start to hallucinate, until lobsters begin beckoning him
by name or offering him unsound advice.  Sometimes divers realize that
they are "narced" by the sounds they hear.  Many experience the "jungle
drums," the deafening sound of one's pulse in one's own ears; or they
might simply hear a hum, like a buzzing alarm clock lost under a
pillow.  Below 200

feet, narcosis can supercharge the normal processing of fear, joy,
sorrow, excitement, and disappointment.  Tiny problems-a missing knife,
a bit of silt-can be perceived as unfolding catastrophes and snowball
into panic.  Serious problems-a depleting air tank or the loss of the
anchor line-can appear as niggling annoyances.  In an environment as
unforgiving as a deep shipwreck, the short-circuiting of judgment,
emotion, and motor skills complicates everything.

The nitrogen in the diver's breathing gas poses another problem.  It
accumulates in his tissues with both depth and time.  This is generally
not a problem on shallow dives of short duration.  On deeper, longer
dives, during the ascent the accumulated nitrogen is released from his
tissues back into his bloodstream.  The rate at which this happens
determines whether a diver will suffer from the bends, or even if he'll
die.

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.  The same effect can be observed by slowly
opening a soda bottle; if you gradually reduce the pressure inside the
bottle, the bubbles stay small.  The size of the bubbles is key.  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.

When a diver ascends quickly, however, the surrounding atmospheric
pressure drops rapidly.  That causes the accumulated nitrogen in his
tissues to form massive quantities of large bubbles, just as when you
rapidly unscrew the soda bottle's cap.  Large nitrogen bubbles are the
mortal enemy of the deep diver.  When large bubbles form outside the
bloodstream, they can press on tissues, blocking circulation.  If this
happens in the joints or near the nerves, the result will be agonizing
pain that might last weeks or even a lifetime.  If it happens in the
spinal cord or the brain, the blockage can cause paralysis or a fatal
stroke.  If too many large bubbles make their way back to the lungs,
the lungs will shut down, a condition called the "chokes," which can
stop a diver's breathing.  If too many large bubbles find their way
into the arterial system, the diver can suffer a

pulmonary baro trauma or gas embolism, a condition that can cause a
stroke, blindness, unconsciousness, or death.

To guarantee that he ascends slowly, keeping the nitrogen bubbles
microscopically small, the deep diver deliberately pauses at
predetermined depths to allow these bubbles to work their way out of
his system.  These pauses are known as "decompression stops" and have
been optimally calculated by scientists.  A diver breathing air who
spends twenty-five minutes at a depth of 200 feet might spend an hour
working his way back to the surface, stopping first at a depth of 40
feet and waiting for five minutes, then ascending slowly and stopping
again for ten minutes at 30 feet, fourteen minutes at 20 feet, and for
twenty-five minutes at 10 feet.  The amount of time he spends
decompressing is a function of depth and time- longer dives and deeper
depths mean more decompression.  That is one reason why shipwreck
divers don't spend hours working underwater; the decompression time for
a two-hour dive might be as long as nine hours.

Narcosis and decompression sickness are the patriarchs on the family
tree of deep-wreck diving dangers.  A diver does not dare board a
charter boat bound for a deep wreck unless he honors these perils.

Atlantic divers in the Northeast reach shipwrecks by charter boats.
Though some divers own their own recreational boats, such smaller craft
cannot withstand the forces of the open Atlantic.  Charter boats, most
of which are longer than thirty-five feet, are built for the rigors of
the sea.  Customers often make two dives in a day, but they must wait
several hours between turns to fully discharge any nitrogen that
remains in their bodies.  Dive charters, therefore, often become
all-day or overnight affairs.

An excellent diver boards the boat with a plan.  For days, maybe weeks
before the trip, he contemplates the wreck, studies its deck plans,
memorizes its contours, decides on a work area, sets reasonable goals,
then constructs a strategy to accomplish those goals.  He believes that
navigation is the key to safety and success aboard a wreck, and he is
unwilling to dig willy-nilly, as do so many wreck

divers, in blind hope of finding a prize.  He has seen guys who do
that, and some of those guys never came up.  A well-conceived plan is
his religion.  Days in advance, he knows what he is supposed to do and
where he is supposed to go, and for that reason he will adapt to
contingencies; and in the deep Atlantic everything is contingency.

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.  Should any of his equipment fail, he will find
trouble.  He carries several thousand dollars' worth of gear: strobe
lights, headlight, flashlights, up lines, hammer, crowbar or
sledgehammer, knives, mask, fins, fin keepers, buoyancy wings,
regulators, manifold, compass, mesh goody bag for artifacts, lift bags
to float those artifacts to the surface, marker buoy (or "safety
sausage") to shoot to the surface in case of emergency, clips, gauges,
dials, tools, writing slate, waterproof marker, laminated decompression
tables, neoprene gloves, hood, stopwatch, weight belt, ankle weights,
jon lines.  Then he packs backups for some of his gear.  He shuns the
casual diver's wet suit for the warmer, more expensive dry suit, which
he wears over two pairs of expedition-weight polypropylene underwear.
He carries two air tanks, not one.  He needs every bit of this stuff.

As the charter boat nears its destination, the captain uses his
navigation equipment to put the vessel "on the numbers," or as close to
the wreck as possible.  His mates-usually two or three divers who work
aboard the boat-find footing on the slippery front deck and grab hold
of the anchor and its line.  A dive boat's anchor is a steel grapple
with four or five long teeth, more like the tool Batman uses to scale
buildings than the traditional two-fluke instrument tattooed on
sailors' biceps.  It is attached first to about fifteen feet of chain,
then to hundreds of feet of three-quarter-inch nylon line.  When the
captain gives the order, the mates will drop this grapple, hoping that
it lands on and snags the shipwreck.

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.  A diver cannot simply jump
off the boat, drop through the water, and expect to land on the wreck.
By the time he splashes, his boat likely will have drifted several
hundred feet with the current, so that it is no longer over the wreck.
Even if the boat remained directly over the wreck, a diver who jumped
off and descended without using the anchor line as a guide would find
himself a toy in the ocean currents that swirl in different directions
at various depths.  Those currents might blow him hundreds of feet from
the wreck.  In the dark waters of the deep Atlantic, where visibility
might be as poor as ten inches, a diver who lands even a few feet away
from the wreck could wander the bottom for years without finding
anything.  Even in those rare cases when bottom visibility is pristine,
say forty feet, a free-descending diver who lands forty-five feet away
from the wreck still won't ever see it.  At that point, he must guess
at a direction in which to search, and if he guesses wrong, he will
become nomad and soon be lost.  Only by descending along the anchor
line can the diver find his wreck.

The trip back up the anchor line is even more critical.  If a diver
cannot locate the anchor line, he will be forced to ascend and
decompress from wherever he happens to find himself.  Such a free
ascent is haunted with bad possibilities.  He still must decompress-a
process requiring an hour or more, depending on his bottom time and
depth-but without an anchor line in hand to keep him steady, he will
find it more difficult to maintain the precise depths necessary for
proper decompression.  This invites the bends.  The bends is only his
first problem.  Without an anchor line to clutch, he will also be blown
about by currents.  Even if he somehow manages to begin his ascent from
directly beneath the dive boat, a free-floating diver who decompresses
for an hour in a current of just two knots-about two miles per
hour-will surface more than two miles from the boat.  At that distance,
he will likely never see the boat, and the boat will likely never see
him.  Even if he spotted the boat, he could not hope to swim to it; he
is already down-current and carrying hundreds of pounds of equipment,
and even a desperate diver cannot swim against those handicaps.  He
will not drown immediately, because his gear is buoyant and because his
suit and buoyancy wings

likely contain air.  But panic is not far off.  He knows that
hypothermia in the cold Atlantic is a few hours away.  He remembers in
fine detail the stories he's heard about sharks attacking divers
adrift.  He knows that even if he is alive in twenty-four hours, the
skin around the cuffs on his dry suit will begin to soften in the salt
water, allowing air to leak out and cold water to seep in.  Now
hypothermia is upon him.  He knows that no one back at the boat will
realize that he has surfaced; they might presume him lost on the wreck
or eaten by a shark, but they will never know for sure because the odds
are that if no one sees him between the white swells on the Atlantic's
surface, no one will ever find him alive, and to the diver lost at sea,
that seems the most terrible result of all.

Because the anchor line is lifeline, it is too risky to simply leave
the grapple snagged on the wreck.  Currents shift underwater, and
grapples can move with that motion and come undone.  The grapple,
therefore, must be secured.  This is the work of the mates, who dive
down to the wreck and "tie in."  Once the tie-in is complete, the mates
release several white foam drinking cups, which rise to the surface and
act as signal to the captain and divers that the anchor line is secure.
White cups mean go time on Atlantjc wreck charters.

When word of the cup sighting reaches the divers, they unpack their
rigs and begin to put on their equipment.  Once dressed, the diver
inspects his equipment, a poking, pulling, coaxing, and stroking
similar to that performed by a private pilot on his aircraft.
Underwater, he will have no such luxury.  If he has questions about his
gear, if he has the vaguest inkling that anything is askew, he must act
now.

A good diver reveals himself in the way he gears up.  He is at one with
his equipment.  He knows where every piece goes; every strap is the
perfect length, every tool expertly placed, and everything fits.  He
moves instinctively, his hands and stuff in a swoop-tug-and-click
ballet until he is transformed into sea creature.  He rarely needs
help.  If another diver moves to assist him, he will usually decline,
saying, "No, thank you" or, more likely, "Don't touch my shit."  He
favors ten-dollar knives over the hundred-dollar versions because when
he loses the cheaper ones, he does not feel obligated, under the
pressure of narcosis, to risk his life searching the bottom to res

cue them.  He cares nothing for the prettiness of his gear, and often
tattoos it with patches, stickers, and graffiti that testify to past
dive exploits.  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.

Standing, the geared-up diver's 350-pound footsteps and hunched posture
make him a neoprene Sasquatch.  In fins, he takes several seconds to
thwack-thud across a slippery deck, and will tumble should a sudden
wave strike the boat.  Breathing air from his twin tanks, or "doubles,"
he will have about twenty-five minutes on a 200-foot wreck before he
must begin a sixty-minute decompression ascent.

Once in the water, the diver's tanks no longer feel heavy on his body
and instead seem to float away from him.  He grabs a "granny" line, a
yellow rope rigged from the stern to the anchor line under the boat. He
taps valves on his dry suit and wings to bleed a bit of air from each,
making himself slightly negatively buoyant, so that his body fades just
below the surface before stopping, spirit like at a depth of just a few
feet.  He pulls himself along the granny line until he reaches the
anchor line.  He vents a little more air.  Now he slowly begins to
sink.

He is on his way to the shipwreck.  Most likely, he is going there
alone.  For all a deep-wreck diver brings along underwater, the most
striking part he leaves behind is a "buddy."  In recreational scuba,
the buddy system is gospel.  Divers stay in pairs, poised to help each
other.  In clear, shallow water, buddies are sound policy.  They can
share air in the event of equipment failure.  They can lead a
distressed partner to the surface or un snag him from a fishing line.
They provide comfort and reassurance just by being there.  On the
bottom of the Atlantic, however, a well-meaning diver can kill himself
and his partner.  A diver who pretzels himself into a shipwreck's
crooked compartment to help another diver might himself become trapped,
or he might foul the visibility so badly that neither man can find his
way out.  A diver attempting to share his air, or "buddy-breathe," with
a panicked diver-a basic duty in recreational scuba-also risks his
life.  A suffocating diver at 200 feet sees a

healthy colleague as a magic carpet, and will kill if he must to jump
aboard that man's air supply.  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.  Should he come face-to-face with a diver who
believes he is dying, that diver's eyes will leap across the water and
become his own eyes, and he will see, through that man's panic, the
spectrum of terrible possibilities that lie just around the corner for
himself.  He will then either panic himself or, more likely, try to
save the distressed diver.  Either way, his life has transitioned in an
instant from secure to moment-by-moment.  This is not to say that
divers cannot or do not work together on a wreck- they often do.  The
good ones, however, never rely on each other for safety.  Their
philosophy is one of coldly resolved independence and self-rescue.

The diver's descent down the anchor line is little more than feint
fall.  Typically, it will take him between two and four minutes to
reach a wreck lying at a depth of 200 feet.  He is virtually weightless
as he drops, an astronaut beneath the sea.  During the first few feet
of descent, the diver's world is blue and clear.  Overhead, he can see
the sun rubbing yellow polka dots onto the glassine ocean surface.  The
diver does not see much marine life at shallow depths, though an
occasional tuna or dolphin might swim along to investigate his odd
shape and noisy, flat-bottomed bubbles.  The diver himself hears two
primary sounds: the hiss of his regulator on his inhalation and the
booming gurgles of his bubbles on his exhalation; together they are the
metronome of his adventure.  As he descends farther, the scenery
evolves in fast-forward; currents, visibility, ambient light, and
marine life shift with depth, none predictably.  In this way, even the
simple descent down the anchor line is an adventure.

The diver sinks to 190 feet.  Now he stands face-to-face with the
shipwreck, crooked and cracked and broken in the way Hollywood never
captures violent endings, the way that rises from ordinary objects when
they are bent backward against nature.  Pipes, conduits, and wires
splay from open wounds.  Plumbing shows.  Fish riding

water columns move in and out of the broken vessel.  Covered in plant
life, only a ship's most basic shapes make sense-a propeller; a rudder;
a porthole.  Much of the rest must be absorbed and contemplated before
the ship reassembles in the diver's mind.  Only rarely, when visibility
is pristine, can a diver hope to view the entirety of the wreck at one
time.  Otherwise he sees only cross sections.  The tunnel vision of
narcosis causes him to perceive even less.

The diver has perhaps twenty-five minutes to work the wreck before he
must begin his ascent to the surface.  If he has splashed with a plan,
he heads straight for the area on the wreck that interests him.  Most
divers stay exclusively outside the wreck.  They come to touch the ship
or search for loose artifacts or snap photographs.  Their work is
steady and conservative.  The spirit of the ship, however, lies inside.
That is where the stories have settled, where one uncovers the
freeze-frames of final human experience.  Inside is where the bridge
equipment lies-the telegraph, helm, and binnacles that gave the ship
direction.  It is where portholes rest, where gauges marked by maritime
and national stampings lie buried, where pocket watches and suitcases
and celebratory champagne bottles rest under blankets of silt.  Only
inside the wreck will a diver find a ship's brass clock, engraved with
its manufacturer's mark and, sometimes, the time of the ship's sinking
frozen on its face.

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.  Nine-foot doorways become two-foot doorways.  Rooms in
which ladies played bridge or captains charted courses are now upside
down or sideways or do not exist at all.  There might be a bathtub on
the wall.  If the ocean is perilous outside the wreck, at least it is
consistent and extends in all directions.  Inside the wreck, where
chaos is architect, dangers come camouflaged in every crevice.  Bad
happens suddenly.  For many, the inside of a shipwreck is the most
dangerous place they will ever go.

A diver who enters a wreck, especially if he intends to penetrate
deeply, must conceive of space differently than he does on land.  He

must think in three dimensions, digesting navigational concepts- turn
left, drop down, then rise diagonally and follow the seam to the
right-that are nonsensical outside water.  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 three rooms to reach the captain's
quarters or only two?  Did I go left-right-right or right-left-right
before ascending to this gun turret?  Have I changed deck levels
without realizing it?  Is that the pipe I saw next to the wreck's exit,
or is it one of six other pipes I saw while swimming through here?
These questions are trouble.  They mean, in all likelihood, that the
diver is lost.

A diver lost inside a wreck is in grave danger.  He has a finite air
supply.  If he cannot find his way out, he will drown.  If he finds his
way out but breathes down his tanks in the process, he will not have
enough air left for proper decompression.  Narcosis, already humming in
the background of his brain, crescendos in the lost diver like a broken
record, shouting down reason as it reminds him, You're lost you're lost
you're lost you're lost you're lost... He will be tempted to guess at a
way out, but if he does so he will become a child in a fun-house, his
blind movements virtually certain to deliver him into the ship's myriad
dead ends and false pathways, each of which will only disorient him
further.  His air drops lower.  His time grows shorter. This is how
lost divers become corpses.

Even if a diver manages his navigation, he must still contend with
issues of visibility.  At 200 feet, the ocean bottom is dark.  Inside
the wreck, it's darker, sometimes pitch-black.  If visibility were
simply a matter of illumination, a diver's headlight and flashlight
would suffice.  But a shipwreck is filled with silt and debris.  The
diver's slightest movement-a reach for a dish, a kick with the fin, a
turn to memorize a landmark-can stir the silt and disturb visibility.
At times of such stark darkness, the deep-wreck diver is more a shadow
diver, aiming at the shapes of a shipwreck as much as at the shipwrecks
themselves.

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.  Visibility is now even worse.  There is no longer
any such thing as right and left.  Over there doesn't exist anymore. In
a fog of silt and rust and oil, rudimentary navigation seems
impossible.

To keep from raising silt clouds, divers learn to travel with a minimum
of locomotion.  Some move like crabs, using only their fingers to pull
themselves along, their fins floating motionless in the water behind
them.  They do not kick to rise or fall, but rather inflate or deflate
their wings, an air bladder between the diver and his tanks used for
buoyancy control.  When they arrive at an interesting area, they might
draw in their knees and arms, adjust their buoyancy, and work while
kneeling, their shins only brushing the shipwreck floor.

These measures are stopgap.  A diver who spends time inside a wreck
will screw the "viz"; it's just a matter of how soon and how badly.
Once the silt billows and the rust flakes fall and the oil spreads,
visibility in the wreck might stay fouled for several minutes,
sometimes longer.  Even if a diver has a perfect handle on navigation,
he cannot see enough to work his way back now, and if he moves much at
all the silt swells further.  In zero viz, a diver might be five feet
from the exit and never find his way out.  This is the kind of
realization that doesn't play well with narcosis, where small problems
grow larger under jungle drums, and zero viz can seem the largest
problem of them all.  In an overpowering darkness, the blinded diver is
a prime candidate to go lost.

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.  In the violence of the ship's sinking, her
ceilings and walls and floors likely vomited their guts. Once-civilized
spaces are now spaghettied with electric cables, wires, bent metal
rods, bedsprings, couch springs, sharpened pieces of broken equipment,
chair legs, tablecloths, conduit pipes, and other now

threatening items that once conducted the ship's unseen business.  All
of it dangles nakedly in the diver's space.  All of it stands ready to
snag his hose or manifold or any of dozens of other bulky parts that
make up the life-support components of his gear.  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.

A diver lost or tangled inside a shipwreck has come face-to-face with
his maker.  Corpses have been recovered inside wrecks-eyes and mouths
agape in terror, the poor diver still lost, still blinded, still
snagged, still pinned.  Yet a curious truth pertains to these perils:
rarely does the problem itself kill the diver.  Rather, the diver's
response to the problem-his panic-likely determines whether he lives or
dies.

Here is what happens to a panicked diver in trouble inside a
shipwreck:

His heart and respiratory rates jump.  At 200 feet, when every lungful
of air requires seven times The volume as that on the surface, a
panicked diver can breathe down his tanks so quickly that the needles
on his gauges begin to drop into the red before his eyes.  That sight
further quickens his heart and breath, which in turn further reduces
the time he has to solve his problems.  Heavier respiration also means
heavier narcosis.  Narcosis amplifies panic.  A vicious cycle has
begun.

He responds to panic as evolution designed him to, immediately and
forcefully.  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.  A lost diver who panics, for example, will thrash about in
search of an exit.  That movement will billow silt and foul the
visibility, so that now he cannot see.  Blinded, he searches more
desperately for a way out; in that struggle, he might become entangled
or collapse a heavy object dangling overhead.  He breathes harder.  He
sees his gauges dropping further.

The diver might call for help.  Sound travels well underwater, but it
is directionless, so even if someone hears his cries it is doubtful
they could trace them.  When a man is trapped alone in a shipwreck,

his brain starts to think in declaratives, not ideas.  I'm gonna die!
Get out!  Get out!  The diver tries harder.  The needles dip.  It is
dark.  It is likely the end.

In 1988, a skilled Connecticut diver named Joe Drozd signed up for an
Andrea Doria trip aboard the Seeker.  It would be his first journey to
the great wreck, a dream come true.  To ensure a safe dive, he added a
third air tank-a small emergency, or "pony," bottle-to his normal set
of doubles.  "Just in case," he reasoned.  Drozd and two partners
penetrated the wreck through Gimbel's Hole, a foreboding rectangle
opened into the ship's first-class section in 1981 by Peter Gimbel,
heir to the Gimbel's department store fortune.  The opening is black
against the dark green ocean and drops 90 feet straight down, a sight
that chills the blood of even the most experienced divers.

Shortly after entering the wreck, at a depth of about 200 feet, one of
the valve-regulator assemblies on Drozd's back became tangled in a
ninety-foot yellow polypropylene line left as a landmark by another
diver.  Under perfect conditions, a diver would ask his partners to
untangle him.  At 200 feet, narcosis humming, conditions are never
perfect.  Drozd reached for his knife; he would simply cut himself
free.  But instead of using his right hand, as was his custom, he
grabbed the knife with his left hand, likely because the entanglement
was behind him on that side.  The awkward reach to cut the tangled line
put pressure against the exhaust valve on his dry suit, a result he
likely never expected.  As Drozd cut at the snagged line, the air in
his suit began to vent, making him negatively buoyant.  He began to
sink.  Depth brings harder narcosis.  His narcosis began to pound.

Dropping, Drozd hurtled toward his mental meniscus.  Every time he
reached to cut the tangled line, he vented more air from his suit and
got heavier.  His narcosis built, the kind that blocks good ideas, such
as changing knife hands.  His breathing quickened.  His narcosis
gained.  In the growing urgency of his situation, Drozd breathed dry
the first of his two double tanks before switching, mistakenly, to his
pony bottle instead of his second full-sized tank.

A few minutes later, Drozd freed himself from the tangled line.  At

around this time, his two partners realized he was in trouble and swam
toward him to help.  With narcosis raging, his dry suit constricting
tighter, his body sinking farther, he breathed dry what he believed to
be his second primary tank.

His two partners reached him.  One grabbed Drozd and tried to swim him
up and out of the Doria, but Drozd was leaden from losing the air in
his dry suit.  The divers would have to do something to keep Drozd from
sinking farther.  One filled his own suit with extra air, increasing
his buoyancy so that he might grab Drozd and more easily ascend with
him out of the wreck.  But by now, starved for breath and believing
both his primary tanks to be empty, Drozd spiraled into full terror. He
flailed against his helpers until the diver who had grabbed him lost
his grip.  That diver, now overly buoyant and without the heavy Drozd
as counterbalance, rocketed out of the wreck and toward the surface of
the ocean, unable in the violence of the ascent to vent his suit, which
expanded, making him more buoyant with every foot he ascended into
shallower, lower-pressure waters.  Soon, that diver was at 100 feet and
still shooting to sunshine.  If he broke the surface without
decompressing, he would either suffer serious central nervous system
damage or die.  He could do nothing to vent his suit in this explosive
ascent.  The anchor line was nowhere in sight.  He kept rising.

Back down at the Doria, Drozd spat his regulator from his mouth, a
physiological reaction in blind panic.  Icy salt water choked his
lungs.  His gag reflexes fired.  His tunnel vision narrowed to
blackness.  His remaining partner offered Drozd his backup regulator,
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.

His second partner, also ravaged by narcosis and the terribleness of
the moment, was now in danger of panicking himself.  He believed both
Drozd and his other partner to be dead.  He checked his gauges and
confirmed what he feared most: he was over his time limit and should
have already started his own decompression.  He

began his ascent believing himself the only one of the three to survive
the event.

In fact, the first diver had caught a miracle.  At about 60 feet, he
finally managed to vent the gas from his suit and slow his ascent.  At
the same time, he glimpsed the anchor line, a stripe in the ocean from
God, and swam over and clutched it as if it were life itself.  He
survived without injury.  The other diver completed his decompression
and also survived, terrified but unscathed.  Drozd died with a full
tank of air on his back.

Not all divers succumb to panic as Drozd did.  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.  The process can take years.  It often requires study,
discussion, practice, mentoring, contemplation, and hard experience. At
work, he nods when the boss reveals the latest sales figures, but he is
thinking, "Whatever else is wrong inside a shipwreck, if you are
breathing you are okay."  Paying bills or setting the VCR at home, he
tells himself, "If you find trouble inside a wreck, slow down.  Fall
back.  Talk yourself through it."  As he gains more experience, he will
meditate upon what every great diver advises him: "Fix the first
problem fully and calmly before you even think about the second
problem."

An ordinary diver will sometimes rush to extricate himself from trouble
so that no other diver will witness his predicament.  A disciplined
diver is willing to risk such embarrassment in exchange for his life.
The disciplined diver also is less susceptible to greed.  He knows that
divers busy grabbing are no longer focused on navigation and survival.
He remembers, even under narcosis, that perhaps three-quarters of all
divers who have perished on the Andrea Doria

died with a bag full of prizes.  He knows that it is narcosis talking
when, after recovering six dishes, he sees a seventh and thinks, "I
can't live with myself if someone else gets that dish."  He pays
attention when a charter captain like Danny Crowell passes around a
bucketful of broken dishes and bent silverware and tells his customers,
"I want you people to see this stuff.  This is what a guy died for.  We
found it in his bag.  Look real hard.  Touch it.  Are these pieces of
shit worth your life?"

Once a diver has exited the shipwreck, he begins the journey back to
the dive boat.  If all has gone well, he feels exhilarated and
triumphant; if he is heavily narced, he might be downright giddy.  He
cannot relax now.  The trip to the surface is rife with its own perils,
each of them capable of striking down even the best man.

Once the diver finds the anchor line, he begins his ascent.  He cannot,
however, simply float balloon-style up the line.  If he should lose his
focus during such an ascent-perhaps from seeing a shark or by
daydreaming-he would find himself rising past the critical stops
required for proper decompression.  A good diver instead seeks a
neutral buoyancy for his ascent up the anchor line.  In that
near-weightless state, he can propel himself upward with the gentlest
pull or kick, but will never find himself free-floating past the
crucial stops should he become distracted.  As he ascends, he will
gradually vent air from his suit and wings to retain his neutrality and
prevent any sudden ascent.

Presuming that the water is calm, the ascending, decompressing diver
will find himself with an hour or more of idle time at his various deco
stops.  At around 60 feet, the depth of his first hang, the sun likely
will have reappeared and the ocean will have warmed around him.  The
water might be clear or murky, vacant or thick with jellyfish and other
small animals.  Most often it will look blue-green.  In this weightless
transition through worlds, free from narcosis and the storm of dangers
at depth, the diver may finally allow himself to become a sightseer on
his own adventure.

At the surface and now near the dive boat's bow, the diver swims
alongside or under the boat to reach a metal ladder unfolded into

the water at the stern.  He need only climb aboard to end his dive.  In
calm seas, the process is routine.  In rough seas, a steel ladder
becomes a wild animal.

In 2000, a diver named George Place, freshly surfaced from exploring an
offshore wreck, reached for the ladder on the dive boat Eagle's Nest.
Seas raged and fog charcoaled the horizon.  In the boat's upward heave,
a rung from the ladder uppercut Place's jaw.  Stunned and nearly
unconscious, he lost his grip.  He was cast into the current,
disoriented and drifting behind the boat.  Dive boats trail a "tag
line" from their sterns-attached to a buoy-so that a drifting diver
might grab hold and pull himself back.  Place couldn't manage to reach
the line.  A diver who gets behind the tag line runs a serious risk of
going lost.  Place got behind the line in a hurry.

A witness on board ran to alert the captain, Howard Klein.  But by the
time Klein reached the back of the boat, Place was out of sight; he
just wasn't there anymore.  The captain could not simply cut the anchor
line and give chase with the Eagle's Nest; he still had other divers
decompressing on that line.  Instead, he grabbed a two-way radio,
rushed into his small Zodiac chase boat, and set out to search for the
lost diver.  Within seconds, in the increasing violence of the seas,
Klein disappeared from view, too.  A minute later he radioed to Eagle's
Nest that the outboard motor on his Zodiac had failed.  He was also
adrift and, in the pitching waves, could see the dive boat only when
the ocean's waves crested.  By that time, Place's wife, who was a mate
aboard Eagle's Nest, issued a mayday by radio.  She reached only a
single fishing boat, but it was an hour away.  That boat promised to
try to raise a closer vessel.  After that, no one could do anything but
pray that Place was still conscious in the big Atlantic.

After thirty minutes, Klein coaxed the Zodiac's motor back to life. But
he had drifted too far by that time to have any hope of finding Place. 
He found his way back to the dive boat.  A short time later, a radio
call came in to Eagle's Nest.  A closer fishing boat had sighted
Place-five miles from the dive boat and alive.  He had been adrift for
more than two hours.  Klein, who now had all his divers back on his
boat, retrieved Place, sobbing but healthy.  After that, divers aboard
the Eagle's Nest came to believe in miracles.

Place had been ten seconds from completing a ninety-minute dive and had
ended up cheek-to-cheek with death.  It was another example of the
truth that defines the sport of deep-wreck diving and shapes the lives
of those who love it.

On a deep-wreck dive, no one is ever truly safe until he is back on the
deck of the dive boat.

CHAPTER THREE

"7T5HAPE OF POWER

The SEEKER had twenty minutes behind her when the last embers of Jersey
Shore nightlife snuffed out under the gray-black horizon.  The boat's
external running lights, configured white on the mast, red on the port
side, green on the starboard to indicate a "motor vessel under way,"
now stood as the only evidence of fourteen men who had decided to take
a chance.

Nagle and Chatterton set the autopilot in the wheelhouse.  It would be
six hours until the Seeker hit the numbers.  In the salon below, the
paying customers worked themselves out of their clothes and onto the
wooden, infirmary-style bunks that lined the outer edges of the
compartment.  Most had no trouble securing their lucky spot.  Each man
spread blankets or sleeping bags across his bunk; 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.

On this night, while Nagle and Chatterton worked in the wheel-house,
the remaining divers slept in the salon.  They were:

Dick Shoe, forty-nine, Palmyra, New Jersey; administrator, Princeton
University plasma physics lab

Kip Cochran, forty-one, Trenton, New Jersey; policeman

Steve Feldman, forty-four, Manhattan; stagehand, CBS

Paul Skibinski, thirty-seven, Piscataway, New Jersey; excavating
contractor

Ron Ostrowski, age unknown, background unknown

Doug Roberts, twenty-nine, Monmouth Beach, New Jersey; owner, cosmetics
business

Lloyd Garrick, thirty-five, Yardley, Pennsylvania; research chemist

Kevin Brennan, thirty, Bradley Beach, New Jersey; commercial diver

John Hildemann, twenty-seven, Cranford, New Jersey; owner of excavation
company

John Yurga, twenty-seven, Garfield, New Jersey; dive-shop manager

Mark McMahon, thirty-five, Florham Park, New Jersey; commercial diver
Steve Lombardo, forty-one, Staten Island, New York; physician

Some of these men had arrived in pairs and planned to dive together:
Shoe with Cochran, Feldman with Skibinski, Ostrowski with Roberts,
McMahon with Yurga.  The others preferred to dive solo, many for safety
reasons-a partner can't panic and kill you, they reasoned, if he's not
your partner.  Most knew one another from previous deep-wreck trips, or
at least by reputation.  All had searched for "mystery numbers" before.
Collectively, they had discovered several garbage barges and rock piles
for these efforts.

The Atlantic was kind to the Seeker through the evening.  Around
sunrise, loran readouts showed the boat just a half mile from the
target site.  Nagle cut the autopilot, throttled back the twin diesels,
and swiveled to face the bottom finder.  In the salon, divers began to
awaken, the new quiet of calmed engines an alarm clock to eager men.

Nagle nudged the boat closer to the numbers.  A shape appeared on the
bottom finder's electronic display.

"There's something on the numbers," Nagle called to Chatterton.

"Yeah, I see it," Chatterton replied.  "It looks like a ship on its
side."  "Christ, John, it also looks like it's deeper than two hundred
feet.  I'm going to make a couple passes over it to get a better
look."

Nagle cut the Seekers wheel hard to port, throwing her stern starboard
and pulling the boat around for a second pass, then a third and a
fourth-"mowing the lawn," as they call it.  All the while, he watched
the mass at the ocean bottom morph in and out of the bottom finder's
screen.  On some passes, the instrument showed the object at 230 feet;
on one it read 260 feet.  Brennan, Yurga, and Hildemann climbed the
ladder and entered the wheelhouse.  "What do we got, Bill?"  Yurga
asked.

"This is deeper than I was expecting," Nagle told them.  "And whatever
it is, it's lying low-there's not a lot of relief.  I think it might be
a two-hundred-and-thirty-foot dive."

There were no experienced 230-foot divers in 1991.  Even those brave
enough to test the Andrea Doria almost never went to her bottom, at 250
feet; most stayed near that wreck's high point, around 180 feet, with
the very best divers testing 230 feet perhaps once or twice a year. But
Nagle kept saying that the mass on his bottom finder looked to be at
230 feet.  Worse, it seemed to rise only about 30 feet off the sand.

Chatterton was capable of diving to 230 feet.  He and Nagle devised a
plan.  Brennan and Hildemann would throw the hook.  Chatterton would
splash and check out whatever was on the bottom.  If it looked worth
diving and the depth was reasonable, he would tie in the anchor line.
If it was some crappy barge or pile of rocks, or if the depth really
was 260 feet, he would trip loose the hook, return to the surface, and
call off the dive.  Nagle agreed.

By now, the other divers had gathered on the deck below the wheelhouse,
awaiting a verdict.  Nagle slid the door open, stepped out, and leaned
over the rail.

"Listen, ladies, this is what I see.  Whatever is down there is at two
hundred twenty, two hundred thirty feet, and it's laying low.  This is
Doria diving, maybe tougher.  John's going to splash first and check it
out.  If it's some crap garbage barge, we don't touch it-this shit is
too deep to be diving a barge.  If it's something decent and it's not
eat-you-alive deep, we go.  Either way, we wait for John.  Nobody goes
until John gives the okay."

Chatterton collected his gear from the rear deck and began to suit up
while Nagle attempted to hook the wreck.  When the anchor caught, Nagle
cut the boat's engines.  The Seeker and the mass at the ocean's bottom
were now connected.  Nagle climbed down to the back deck, where
Chatterton was making a final check of his gauges.  Before long,
everyone on the boat had gathered around the dressing table. Chatterton
gave some final instructions.

"Give me six minutes, then give me slack," he told Nagle.  "That'll
give me time to shoot down and look around.  If the thing is no good or
too deep, I'm gonna pop two cups.  If you see two cups, that means I'm
not tying in and you should take up the grapple and I'll come up with
it.  But if I send up one cup, that means it's worth diving and it's
not too deep.  You see one cup, take in the slack because I'm already
tied in."

Chatterton turned to the rest of the divers.

"Just to be safe, just to make sure there's no problem, nobody splashes
until I finish my deco and come back on board and brief you guys.
Everyone cool with that?"

The divers nodded.  Chatterton jvalked to the edge of the boat, placed
his regulator in his mouth, pulled his maskjwer his face, and checked
his watch.  Six minutes.  Nagle checked his watch.  Six minutes.  Nagle
went back to the wheelhouse, killed the power on the loran units, and
hid the bottom finder's thermal paper graphs in a drawer.  He liked
these guys; they were his customers and his friends.  But he didn't
risk his numbers with anyone.  Yurga, Brennan, and Hildemann returned
to the bow.  Chatterton knelt on the rail and fell sideways into the
ocean.

Chatterton swam just below the surface to the anchor line, then grabbed
hold of the line and purged a bit of air from his wings to reduce his
buoyancy.  The current began swirling and ripping, and not just in one
direction, so that the anchor line bent in S shapes and Chatterton
found himself white-knuckling the line and forcing himself down
two-handed in a fight to keep from being blown from the rope.

In normal seas, such a descent might have taken two minutes.  Five
minutes after he splashed, Chatterton was still fighting.  "I'm

getting my ass kicked and they're going to give me slack before I even
get down there," he mumbled to himself.  As his watch clicked six
minutes, 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.  In the poor five-foot
visibility, he could see only specks of rust on the metal and, above
him, a rounded railing and a soft corner of some kind, an oddly
streamlined shape, he thought, for what was probably just a barge.  But
at least this wasn't a pile of rocks.  Chatterton checked his depth
gauge: 218 feet.  The sand below him looked to be 230 feet, the outer
limit diveable by the men topside.  He scanned for a high point to tie
into and noticed what looked to be a strut at about 210 feet.  The
slack arrived, lucky to reach him through the swirling waters above. 
Chatterton tripped loose the grapple, swam to the strut, and tied the
grapple and its fifteen feet of chain until the hook was secure.  He
took one white foam cup from his goody bag and released it. This dive
was a go.

Aboard the Seeker, the crew at the bow scanned the waves.  When
Chatterton's signal appeared, Yurga ran to the galley and threw open
the door.

"He blew one cup!"  Yurga yelled.  "We're going diving!"  The crew
hauled in the anchor line's slack, wrapped it snug to the bitt, and
joined the rest of the divers on the Seeker's back deck.  Chatterton
would likely spend twenty minutes on the bottom, meaning he would owe
an hour of decompression.  No one made a move for his equipment.
Everyone waited for Chatterton.

At the ocean's bottom, Chatterton clipped a strobe light to the anchor
line's chain.  Sideways white particles continued to rush through the
green-black ocean panorama, limiting Chatterton's visibility to no more
than ten feet.  In his headlight beam, Chatterton could make out the
general shape of a ship's hull.  But this hull seemed to him to have a
soft roll to it, an elegant shape built not for moving cargo or pumping
supplies but for gliding.  At 205 feet, he reached the top of the wreck
and began to pull himself forward against the current, careful to keep
hold of the structure underneath to avoid being blown adrift.  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.  He moved slowly
to digest every picture.  Much of the mass lay covered in white and
orange anemones, dulling the shape of whatever lay beneath.  A few
seconds later, Chatterton pulled himself to an area overgrown in bent
and rusted pipes, a tangle of chopped and frayed electric cables a
sudden haircut around it.  Beneath this nest of broken equipment,
bolted to the wreck, lay four undamaged cylinders, each perhaps six
feet in length.

"Those are pipes," Chatterton thought.  "This is a pipe barge.  Damn,
this is probably a tanker or sludge barge."

Chatterton continued along the top of the wreck.  Narcosis began to hum
as Muzak from the background of his brain.  A few seconds later, he
spotted a hatch.  He stopped.  Barges did not have hatches like this.
He swam closer.  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?  Chatterton pushed his
head inside the hatch.  The interior of the mass lit white under his
headlight.  This was a room.  He was sure because the walls were still
there.  A startled fish with a wide face and fang whiskers swam past
Chatterton's mask, looked him briefly in the eye, then U-turned and
disappeared back into the wreck.  Visibility was excellent in this
enclosed space protected from ocean particulates.  Against one of the
walls lay a shape.  Chatterton stayed motionless and took it in.  "This
shape," he thought, "is unlike any other shape in the world."
Chatterton's heart pounded.  Was he seeing things?  Was he more narced
than he believed?  He closed his eyes for a moment and opened them
again.  The shape was still there.

Fins.  Propeller.  Cigar body.  A shape from scary books and terrifying
movies.  A shape left over from childhood's imagination.  A shape of
power.  A torpedo.

A complete, intact torpedo.

Chatterton's body heaved.  He began a two-man dialogue with himself,
partly to check his narcosis, partly because this was too much to
discuss alone.

"I'm narced," he told himself.  "I'm at two hundred and twenty feet.
I'm exhausted from fighting the current.  I could be seeing things."

"You are on top of a submarine," he replied.

"There are no submarines anywhere near this part of the ocean.  I have
books.  I have studied books.  There are no submarines here.  This is
impossible."

"You are on top of a submarine."

"I'm narced."

"There is no other shape like that torpedo.  Remember those rolled
edges you saw on the hull, the ones that looked built for gliding?
Submarine.  You have just discovered a submarine."

"This is a huge dive."

"No, John, this is more than a huge dive.  This is the holy grail."

Chatterton pulled his head outside the hatch.  A minute ago he'd had no
idea where he was on this wreck.  Now the torpedo had become a
lighthouse.  He knew that submarines fired torpedoes from both ends.
That meant he was near either the bow or the stern.  The current moved
in the direction the torpedo pointed.  If he let go and drifted with
the current, he would soon arrive at one end of the wreck.  At that
point it should be simple to determine whether it was bow or stern.  As
he released his grip, the current awoke and roared so suddenly that it
seemed to have been screamed from the submarine itself, an angry
exhaust from a long-asleep machine now awakened.  The current flung
Chatterton past the anchor line, sling shotting 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.

Chatterton had seen photographs of submarines before.  The bows were
blunted and angled downward and aft, while the sterns were streamlined
horizontally at the top to make room for propellers and rudder
underneath.  This was the bow.  This was the bow of a submarine.

He looked closely at the marine growth and the deterioration of

the metal on the wreck.  There was no mistaking the ship's vintage.
This submarine had come from World War II.  He knew from his books that
there were no sunken American submarines in this area.  He looked again
at the wreck.  For a moment he dared not think it.  But it was
undeniable.  "I'm holding on to a U-boat," Chatterton said out loud.
"I'm holding on to a World War II German U-boat."

By now, Chatterton had reached the end of his twenty-minute bottom
time.  He swam back to the strobe light he had clipped to the anchor
line, staying close to the wreck to shield himself from the wrath of
the onrushing current.  As he swam, he watched the hull's rolled edges
unfold below him, beautiful curves engineered for stealth, curves that
still looked secret.

It was time for Chatterton to leave.  His first scheduled decompression
stop was not until a depth of 60 feet.  On the way up, his narcosis
fading, he argued against himself.  "Maybe you didn't see a torpedo.
Maybe you saw a fan inside a pipe barge.  People come up from 230 feet
saying stupid things all the time, and now you're going to be the guy
saying the stupid stuff."  He knew better.  He had controlled his
narcosis.  That was a torpedo.  That was the bow of a U-boat.

Chatterton made his first stop at 60 feet.  The water was sunlit and
warm.  The last traces of narcosis had evaporated.  The torpedo's image
now throbbed sharp in his memory.  The catalog of submarines he had
studied over the years emerged as a dossier before him.  Some were
hundreds of miles to the north, others hundreds of miles south.  None
was anywhere near here.  Could there be a crew on board?  Could this be
a U-boat with a crew on board that no one in the world knew about but
him?  Too fantastic.  And what was it doing in New Jersey waters?

Chatterton ascended to 40 feet and began his second hang.  There, he
remembered a dream he'd had years ago of finding a mystery submarine.
In that dream, the sub he discovered was Russian and the crew still on
board.  It was a glorious dream, but the part he remembered most was
how immediately he realized it had been a dream, and he had realized
this within a second of awakening because such a wonderful thing could
never happen in real life.

Chatterton ascended to 30 feet and began another stop.  He had another
twenty-five minutes decompression time before he could

surface and brief the others about his find.  Topside, the divers
followed Chatterton's bubbles as they gurgled to the surface along the
anchor line.  They were supposed to wait for him to surface.

"The suspense is killing me," Brennan told the other divers.  "I gotta
do something."

Brennan, with his long hair, Fu Manchu mustache, and "It's cool, dude"
sensibility, might have passed for a Grateful Dead roadie if he hadn't
been such a meticulous diver.  While every other man aboard the Seeker
that day favored a modern dry suit that provided deep insulation from
the forty-degree Atlantic bottom temperatures, Brennan stayed loyal to
the tattered, epoxied, and patched wet suit he wore to retrieve sunken
golf carts and fix swimming pools in rich folks' backyards.  Bound by
duty, other divers would break Brennan's stones about his ancient
getup.  "Kevin," they'd ask, "does that suit date to the Neolithic or
Mesozoic era?"

"You guys want to be all toasty and warm," Brennan would counter.  "I
wear this same suit to the Doria, man.  The Doria!  I have more
mobility in this thing than all you guys put together.  And goddamn it,
if I gotta piss, I piss.  You moo ks in your dry suits have to hold it
in. Fuck that crap-I piss!"

Other divers would hear this explanation and shake their heads.  It was
forty degrees on the Doria.  A wet suit was like wearing a T-shirt. But
damn if Brennan didn't surface after ninety minutes in those
temperatures clutching some killer artifact or fat lobster.  Grinning
ear to ear as he stepped out of his patchwork wet suit, dive after
successful dive, he seemed to have a bit of Houdini in him.

As Chatterton's bubbles continued to rise along the anchor line,
Brennan geared up in his trademark minimalist fashion.  He didn't
believe in draping himself in backup gear and the latest
accoutrements-those guys looked like goddamn Christmas trees.  To
Brennan, the less you carried, the less that could go wrong.  And the
faster you could splash in case you couldn't stand the suspense any
longer.

Within minutes, Brennan had flipped over the Seeker's side.  Seconds
later he reached Chatterton, who was still hanging, still shoe-horning
the wonder of his discovery into the reality centers of his brain.
Brennan startled him with a tap on the shoulder, then put his palms up
and shrugged his shoulders, the universal "What's up?"

signal.  Chatterton removed a writing slate and pencil from his goody
bag, then scrawled a single word as big and bold as would fit on the
tablet.  It said, "SUB."

For a moment, Brennan could not move.  Then he began to scream through
his regulator.  The words came out as if spoken from behind two
pillows, but were still intelligible.

"Are you kidding, John?  Are you surer Really?"

Chatterton nodded.

Brennan yelled, "Oh, God!  Oh, shit!  Oh, Christ!"

Brennan could have plunged straight down to the wreck and had the
submarine to himself.  But this was not the kind of information decent
dudes hoarded.  He shot back up the anchor line, bobbed on the surface,
and yanked the regulator from his mouth.

"Yo, Bill!  Bill!"  he called to Nagle, who was still in the
wheel-house.  Nagle rushed outside the compartment, thinking Brennan
was in trouble-a diver wouldn't surface and scream after a minute
underwater unless he was in trouble.

"What the hell happened, Kevin?"  Nagle called.

"Yo!  Bill!  Bill!  Check this out: John says it's a submarine!"

Nagle did not need to hear anything else.  He ran down the wheelhouse
stairs and gathered the remaining divers.

"Chatterton says it's a sub."

Until this point, many of the divers had held deep reservations about
exploring a new wreck at 230 feet.  The word sub vaporized those
concerns.  The divers rushed to gear up.  Only Nagle, whose alcoholism
had degraded his physical condition and had made this kind of deep
diving impossible, remained behind.  On the anchor line, Brennan
stuffed the regulator back into his mouth and headed down, pumping a
pair of "Way to go!"  fists as he passed Chatterton.  Several minutes
later, as Chatterton ascended to his 20-foot stop, the other eleven
divers dropped past him on an express parade to the virgin wreck.
Chatterton hadn't had his chance to brief the men on the wreck's danger
or depth, but he would have had to lie about the submarine to prevent
any of them from diving that day, and Chatterton didn't lie.  The wreck
lay at 230 feet at its bottom most point in the sand, about 210 feet at
the top-the outer range of doable for a dozen men dizzy with
possibility.

When Chatterton finally finished decompressing, he swam underneath the
Seeker and climbed the aluminum ladder at its stern. Nagle waited for
his protege, hanging on the back rail until Chatterton could remove
his mask and sit on the dressing table.  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.  He ambled over to Chatterton, shaded his eyes from the
sun, and nodded to his friend.  He wanted to say something momentous
because this was the day men like he and Chatterton dreamed of. 
Instead the two men simply looked at each other.

"I hear we did good," Nagle finally said.

"Yeah, Bill," Chatterton said, clapping his friend on the shoulder. "We
did good."

For a minute, Nagle could only shake his head and say, "Damn!"  Every
fiber in his failing body leaned toward the ocean in the way plants
bend toward the sun.  He had never so desperately desired to splash as
he did at this moment.  He had long since stopped bringing gear.  But
as he gazed at Chatterton, his mind was already in the water.

"Tell me about it, John," Nagle said.  "Tell me everything.  Tell me
every detail, every bit of what you saw and felt and heard."

Until this point, Chatterton had never been able to tell Nagle anything
new.  Whatever groundbreaking work Chatterton had done on the Doria and
other great wrecks, Nagle had been there first, and this had pushed
Chatterton to explore harder and deeper, to go someday where even the
great Bill Nagle hadn't gone.  That day, Chatterton could see in
Nagle's grade-school-big eyes, had come.  He told Nagle everything.

As he finished his narrative, Chatterton expected Nagle to ask
technical questions, to grill him on the wreck's level of metallic
degradation or the silt buildup inside the torpedo hatch.  Instead
Nagle said, "This submarine can change me.  This can motivate me and
get my health back.  This is the thing that can get me back."

As Nagle helped Chatterton undress, the other divers began their
exploration of the wreck 230 feet below.  The current had eased

since Chatterton had departed, allowing those so inclined to swim along
the hull without fear of exhaustion.

Ostrowski and Roberts studied the outline of the wreck and the flatness
of its topside decking.  Both pegged it for a submarine.  The duo swam
slowly along the top of the wreck, careful not to over-breathe in their
excitement, never knowing whether they moved forward or aft.  They soon
reached a hole in the top of the steel hull that looked to have been
blown violently inward; steel didn't bend like that willingly.  They
stuck their heads inside, and their lights brought to life a zoo of
broken pipes, machinery, valves, and switches.  They craned their necks
upward and lit nests of electric cables dangling from the ceiling.
Their breath quickened.  This room could contain history; a quick swim
in and a quick swim out and they might find the wreck's identity.
Neither dared enter.  This room might contain answers, but it also held
a hundred ways to kill the overeager diver.

Shoe and Cochran took in the wreck's cigar shape and considered its
level of deterioration.  Each had experience diving World War II ships,
and this wreck looked to them to be worn in just the same ways.  The
team spent most of its dive working to loosen a valve that interested
Cochran, but the part would not budge..

Hildemann, diving alone, had a tougher time believing that the mass he
stood on was a submarine.  That changed as he arrived near the bow of
the wreck about 10 feet off the sand, where he saw a long, narrow tube
reaching into the boat.  He had read books on submarines before.  This
was a torpedo tube-the weapon's passageway into the ocean.

Skibinski and Feldman ventured forty feet from the wreck to obtain a
wider view, a bold decision at this depth and visibility.  They looked
at each other and nodded: a submarine.  They swam back toward the
strobe they had clipped to the anchor line.  Both men had dived the
Texas Tower, one of the darkest of the Northeast's deep wrecks.  This
wreck was darker.  They stayed close to the strobe.

McMahon and Yurga remained atop the wreck.  They, too, knew that this
streamlined form belonged to a submarine.  As they drifted higher,
Yurga spotted flooding vents along the hull, the centerpiece of a
submarine's diving system.  A minute later, Yurga beheld the angled
hatch that Chatterton had seen.  He, too, pushed his head and light
inside.  He, too, saw the tail fins and propeller of the most notorious
sea weapon ever built.  The men yearned to see more, but each had
agreed topside that at this depth, their first priority would be to
stay near the anchor line and therefore stay alive.  Yurga grabbed a
lobster and joined McMahon on the ascent back to the dive boat.

Brennan, the first to arrive after Chatterton, inched forward in the
current until he came to what he recognized was the bow of the sub.  He
allowed himself to drift farther forward until he was twenty feet in
front of the wreck, then turned around to face the bow.  He bled a wisp
of air from his wings and sank gently to the sand, landing on his
knees.  He knelt there as a worshiper, reverent before this grand,
unmistakable mass.  The current began to howl, but Brennan stayed
rooted in the sand, transfixed.

"I can't believe this," he thought.  "I know this is a U-boat.  I know
this thing is German.  Look at it!  It's coming right at me, like in
the opening scene in Das Boot.  I can hear the music from the movie."

From behind his wonder and narcosis, an inner voice managed to remind
Brennan about the current.  He swam back, fighting the water every kick
of the way until he reached the anchor line, deeply narced, winded, and
light-headed.  "I'll never let go of that wreck again," he promised
himself.  Then he began his ascent back to the Seeker.

Between 1939 and 1945, Germany assembled a force of 1,167 U-boats. Each
one, for its ability to stalk enemies invisibly, became the most
perfect and terrible reflection of man's first fear-that death lurks
silently and everywhere, always.  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.  Bodies of men killed aboard ships sunk by
U-boats washed up on American shores during World War II.  The sight
was gruesome.  The implication-that the killers could be anywhere but
could not be seen or heard-was magnitudes worse.

Of those 1,167 U-boats, 757 were either sunk, captured, bombed

in home ports or foreign bases, or fell from accident or collision.  Of
the 859 U-boats that left base for front line patrol, 648 were sunk or
captured while operating at sea, a loss rate of more than 75 percent.
Some were sunk by enemy vessels and aircraft that could not confirm the
kills, others by mines, still others by mechanical or human failure.
Because most U-boats died beneath the water's surface, as many as 65
disappeared without explanation.  In worlds of unsearchable water,
U-boats made the perfect un findable graves.

This day, as the divers began to surface and board the Seeker, they
rushed out of their gear and into debate.  Each of them was giddy to
have discovered a virgin submarine.  Each of them already had a theory.
It could be U-550, a U-boat supposedly sunk in the far North Atlantic
but never recovered.  It could not be the American S-5; numerous divers
had searched for and researched that sub for years and were certain it
lay near Maryland.  The crew could have escaped-a hatch looked to be
open, though it was hard to tell.  Something violent might have
happened to the submarine-no one had seen the conning tower, the
distinctively shaped observation post and entryway atop submarines that
houses the periscopes and serves as the commander's battle station.  A
refrain began to build: Where the hell was the conning tower?

Then, Yurga.  He had stopped, by chance, at a naval bookstore the day
before to pick up some light reading for the trip.  His choice: The
U-boat: The Evolution and Technical History of German Submarines.  When
he produced the book after surfacing, the divers crowded over his
shoulder to compare their memories to the book's detailed schematic
diagrams.  Chatterton recognized the cylindrical bottles he had seen on
the wreck.  Yurga saw the flooding vents.  This thing had to be German.
This thing had to be a U-boat.

As the divers continued their discussion and book study, Chatterton and
Nagle drifted from the group and climbed into the wheelhouse.  The crew
pulled the anchor.  Nagle set a course back for Brielle, fired the
diesels, and pulled away from the site.  Then he and Chatterton began a
private discussion.

This was a historic dive, they agreed, but discovery was only half the
job.  The other half, the everything half, lay in identification.  Both
men scoffed at divers who guessed at the identity of wrecks they had

found, who didn't understand the slovenliness of saying, "Well, we
found a piece of china with a Danish stamp, therefore the wreck is
Danish."  Were Nagle and Chatterton simply to announce that they had
found a submarine, what would that really tell anyone?  But to announce
with certainty the identity of the submarine you discovered, to give
the nameless a name-that is when a man writes history.

To Nagle, there were also more worldly reasons for making the
identification.  Even in his broken-down physical state, the captain
retained his appetite for glory.  Identifying this submarine would
guarantee his legacy as a dive legend and extend his reputation to the
outside world, a place that didn't know from the USS San Diego or even
the Andrea Doria but always paid attention to the word U-boat.  A find
like this would make him famous.  A positive identification would mean
customers.  In those rare instances when a dive charter captain
discovered a shipwreck, he came to own that wreck in the minds of
divers; they wanted to travel with the guy who'd found the missing, to
attach themselves to history through the man who had looked inside
it.

Nagle and Chatterton believed it would take just another dive or two to
pull a positive piece of identification from the wreck: a tag, a
builder's plaque, a diary, something.  Until then, there was sound
reason not to utter a word of the discovery to anyone.  A virgin sub-
especially if it were a U-boat-would attract the attention of rival
divers everywhere.  Some might attempt to shadow the Seeker on its next
trip in order to pick off the location.  Others might guess at the
general vicinity of the location, then try to sneak up on the Seeker
while she was anchored with divers in the water, unable to cut away and
run.  Once a rival had the numbers, he could rush in and steal the
Seeker's credit and glory; there would be no shortage of pirates
looking to make their bones on such a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. But
in the minds of Chatterton and Nagle, the gravest threat came from a
single source, and neither man had to invoke the name to know against
whom they had to guard this wreck with their lives.

Bielenda.

In 1991, the eastern seaboard featured only a handful of big-name dive
charter boats.  The Seeker was one of them.  Another was the Long
Island-based Wahoo, a fifty-five-foot fiberglass hull captained by
fifty-five-year-old Steve Bielenda, a barrel-chested,

cherubic-faced man who looked to be accordioned under his
two-hundred-fifteen-pound frame.  A 1980 Newsday feature had dubbed
Bielenda "King of the Deep," and he seemed unwilling to allow a day to
pass without reminding those who would listen-and especially those who
would not-of the coronation.

From the moment Nagle entered the charter business, in the mid-1980s,
he and Bielenda despised each other.  No one, including the captains
themselves, seemed certain how the hard feelings started, but for years
they lobbed accusations at each other, verbal grenades filled with
reputation-piercing shrapnel: Nagle was a drunk has-been who endangered
his divers and berated customers; Bielenda was a do-nothing blowhard
who was just following the money, going with the established wrecks,
doing nothing new.  Customers often found themselves forced to choose
sides; a diver became either Stevie's boy or Billy's boy, and pity the
soul who confessed to diving with both.  "You're diving the Wahoo next
week?"  an incredulous Nagle would ask customers.  "What kind of
fucking guy are you?  He'll break your balls and steal your money.
You're cattle to him."  It was equally un pretty on the Wahoo, where
the crew would join Bielenda in a dressing-down of anyone foolish
enough to admit enjoying the Seeker.  "Hose this guy off," Wahoo
crewmen were heard to say loudly of paying customers.  "He stinks like
the Seeker." After one Wahoo customer admitted to a fondness for Nagle,
he found the hardcover book he had brought along at the bottom of the
boat's bilge. By 1991, the Bielenda-Nagle feud had become notorious.

To Nagle's supporters, the foundation of Bielenda's bitterness was
basic: Nagle was a threat to Bielenda's title.  Nagle drank too much,
sure, but he remained an explorer, an original thinker, a researcher, a
dreamer, a man of daring.  And he was, as his growing customer base
noted, a bit of a diving legend.  To many, Bielenda seemed to do little
of what made Nagle great, little of the pioneering that should have
been protein to a true king of the deep.  Next to Nagle, Bielenda
appeared to play it safe, a guy who would always sit out bad weather at
the dock while Nagle challenged angry seas.  As Nagle's reputation for
exploration grew, customers drifted to his boat.  Bielenda's business
could easily withstand the migration; what he seemed unable to tolerate
was the affront to his throne.

It wasn't Bielenda's words, however, that worried Nagle as the Seeker
bobbed above this mystery submarine.  It was his certainty that
Bielenda would stop at nothing to claim-jump the wreck.  He had heard
stories about Bielenda-that if you crewed for him on the Wahoo, you
might be expected to give him a choice of whatever artifacts you
recovered; that he half-jokingly told customers that should they ever
recover the Oregon's bell while diving from the Wahoo, they had better
be prepared to gift it to the King of the Deep or swim the thirteen
miles back to shore with the artifact; that Bielenda had friends, and
they seemed to be everywhere-in the Coast Guard, on other charters, on
fishing boats, in the Eastern Dive Boat Association, of which he was
president.  Nagle was convinced that if word leaked of the U-boat
discovery, Bielenda would head straight for it and his goals would be
threefold and deadly: identify the wreck; raid the artifacts; take the
credit.

Chatterton figured that even if the Wahoo didn't jump the wreck, other
divers looking to make their bones would try.  Secrecy, therefore,
would have to be paramount.

"The Seeker is booked for the next two weeks," Nagle told Chatterton.
"Let's come back on the twenty-first, a Saturday.  We invite only the
guys on this trip, no one else, not a goddamn other person, because
these guys took a shot and that'll be their reward.  We make a pact.
Nobody on the boat breathes a word to anyone.  This is our
submarine."

"I'm with you," Chatterton said.

Chatterton left Nagle to steer in the wheelhouse and walked down the
steep white stairs to the rear deck.  He called the divers together and
asked them to step into the salon for a meeting.  One by one, the
divers gathered on bunks, on the floor, by the toaster, under the
Playboy centerfolds, their hair still slicked with salt water, a few
clutching pretzels or Cokes.  Chatterton addressed the group in his
booming, Long Island-tinged baritone.

"This is a huge dive," he said.  "But finding it isn't enough.  We need
to identify it.  We identify it and we rewrite history.

"Bill and I have made a decision.  We're coming back to the wreck on
September twenty-first.  It's a private trip-only you guys are invited.
No one else comes.  There are a lot of great divers out there,

guys who are legends, who would kill to come with us.  They aren't
coming.  If you decide not to attend, your bunk stays empty.

"But we gotta keep this thing secret.  Word gets out that we found a
submarine and we'll have two hundred guys crawling all over our asses
out here."

Chatterton paused for a moment.  No one made a sound.  He asked the men
to swear an oath of secrecy.  Every diver on the boat, he said, had to
swear silence about what they had found this day.  If others asked what
the men had done today, they were to say they dove the Parker.  He told
them to eliminate the word submarine from their vocabularies.  He told
them to say nothing to anyone until they identified the wreck.

"This must be unanimous," Chatterton said.  "Every one of you guys
needs to agree.  If even a single guy in this room isn't comfortable
keeping this secret, that's cool, that's fine, but then the next trip
becomes catch-as-catch-can, an open boat, anyone welcome.  So I gotta
ask you now: Is everyone in?"

Deep-wreck charters are not communal events.  The divers' presence
together on the boat is a matter of transportation, not teamwork; each
devises his own plan, seeks his own artifacts, makes his own
discoveries.  Deep-wreck divers, however friendly, learn to think of
themselves as self-contained entities.  In dangerous waters, such a
mind-set enables them to survive.  Now Chatterton was proposing that
fourteen men become a single, silent organism.  Agreements like this
simply did not occur on dive charters.

For a moment there was silence.  Some of these men had only just met on
this trip.

Then, one by one, the divers went around the room and spoke.

"I'm in."

"Me, too."

"I'm not saying shit."

"Count me in."

"My mouth is shut."

In a minute it was done.  Every man had agreed.  This was their
submarine.  This was their submarine alone.

The Seeker glided back toward Brielle on a cushion of hope and
possibility.  Divers passed around Yurga's U-boat book and tried to
contain themselves, fashioning responsible rejoinders like "We know
this will take time to research and will likely be complex, but with
solid work we should be optimistic about identification."  Inside, they
were jumping on trampolines and dancing in sandboxes.  As evening fell,
they allowed themselves to invent scenarios to explain their submarine,
and in the heady triumph of the journey home, all theories were
credible, every idea a possibility: Could Hitler he aboard this sub?
Isn't there some rumor he tried to escape Germany at the end of the
war?  Maybe the wreck is filled with Nazi gold.  Six hours later, at
about nine P.M."  Nagle eased the boat back into its slip and the
divers gathered their gear.

One diver, Steve Feldman, stayed back, waiting for Chatterton to emerge
from the wheelhouse.  Of the fourteen men aboard this boat, Feldman was
the newest to the sport, with about ten years of experience.  He had
discovered diving later in life, at thirty-four, after a painful
divorce.  So hopelessly had he fallen in love with scuba that he had
virtually willed himself to become an instructor, and of late had been
teaching diving classes in Manhattan.  Many of the divers on board,
including Chatterton, had never seen Feldman before this trip; he dove
most often in warm-water resort locations or for lobsters on Captain
Paul Hepler's famous Wednesday bug runs off Long Island.  As Chatterton
made his way down to the back deck, Feldman stopped him.

"John, I want to thank you," he said.  "This trip has been so cool. And
it's important, it's really important.  I can't wait until we go back. 
I mean, I'm really excited to be returning, and I just want to thank
you and Bill for including me on something like this.  This is like a
dream come true."

"It is for me, too, pal," Chatterton said.  "This is the thing you
dream about."

The Seekers secret lasted nearly two full hours.  Around midnight,
Kevin Brennan dialed his close friend Richie Kohler, a fellow
Brook-lynite.

At twenty-nine, Kohler was already one of the eastern seaboard's

most accomplished and daring deep-wreck divers.  He was also a
passionate amateur historian with a keen interest in all things German.
To Brennan, it would have been disloyal to keep such exciting news from
his friend.  Kohler, in fact, would have been invited on the Seeker
trip but for a history of bad blood with Chatterton.  Kohler had been
one of "Stevie's boys," and though he had since had an angry
falling-out with Bielenda, his history with Chatterton and Bielenda
virtually guaranteed that he would not have been welcome on this
trip.

The phone rang in Kohler's bedroom.

"Richie, man, Richie, wake up.  It's Kevin."

"What time is it ... ?"

"Listen, man, wake up.  We found something really good."

"What'd you find?  What time is it?"

"That's the thing, Richie-I can't tell you what we found."

Kohler's wife rolled over and glared.  He took the phone into the
kitchen.

"Kevin, cut the shit.  Just tell me what you found."

"No, man.  I took an oath.  I promised not to tell.  You can't make me
tell."  "

"Look, Kevin.  You can't call here at midnight, tell me you found
something great, then expect me to go back to sleep.  Let's have it."

"I can't, man.  Richie, come on, don't bust my balls.  I'll tell you
what: take a guess.  If you guess right, I won't say no."

So Kohler, in his underwear and still bleary-eyed, plopped down at the
kitchen table and guessed.  Is it a passenger liner?  No.  A barge? No.
The Cayru?  The Carolina} The Texel*?  Nope, nope, nope.  The guessing
ballet continued for another five minutes; always Brennan's answer was
no.  Kohler rose and paced the room.  His face turned red.

"Kevin, give me a hint, you bastard!  You're breaking my shoes here."

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 ..."

"Have you been drinking, Kevin?"

"That's your hint, Richie."

For five minutes, Brennan repeated the clue.  For five minutes, Kohler
paced and cursed his friend, conjuring expletives and variations of
expletives only another Brooklynite could reassemble.  Then it came to
him: It's-a-not-a-MY boat, it's-a-YOU boat.  A U-boat.  "You found a
U-boat?"  "Shit, yes, Richie, we did."

Kohler sat down.  A U-boat?  There were no U-boats in New Jersey
waters.

"It's gotta be the Spikefish," Kohler finally exclaimed, referring to
the World War II American submarine sunk in the 1960s for target
practice.  "If anything, you found the Spikefish."

"No, Richie!  I was kneeling in the sand in front of it, I was looking
up, and I could hear the music from Das Boot-da-da-DA-da!  You can't
tell anyone.  This is top, top secret."

"I'm calling Bill Nagle right now," Kohler said.  "I gotta be on the
next trip."

"No!  No!  Don't do that, Richie!  You can't say anything."  Kohler
finally agreed to keep the secret.  Like Brennan, he went to sleep that
night rerunning scenes from Das Boot.

The same evening, Nagle hit the bottle in celebration of the discovery.
With each sip, the notion of keeping such a secret seemed selfish, even
criminal.  Ice clinking in his glass, he called Danny Crowell, a mate
on the Seeker who, because of a business obligation, had been unable to
make the trip.  He didn't bother with clues.  "We found a U-boat," he
slurred.  "Don't tell a fucking soul."

The next morning, as John Yurga punched in at the dive shop where he
worked, he received a call from Joe "Captain Zero" Terzuoli, a friendly
dive boat captain.  Terzuoli was the store's best customer.

"Yurga, hey, it's Zero.  How was your trip?"

"Oh, it wasn't too bad.  It was a rock pile, so we moved on and dove
the Parker."

"Oh, well, you took your shot," Zero said.  "Catch you soon, buddy."

Five minutes later, the phone rang again.  Yurga answered.  "This is
Zero!  I just talked to Ralphie, who talked to Danny Crowell, who says
Bill Nagle told him it was a U-boat!"

Yurga's stomach pounded.  He liked Zero.  It sickened him to lie.  But
he had sworn an oath.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Zero.  It was rocks, man. Call
Bill."

Yurga hung up and raced to dial Nagle before Zero could do it.

"Bill, this is Yurga.  What the hell is going on?  Did you open your
mouth?"

"That fucking Danny Crowell!"  Nagle exploded.  "I told him not to
tell!"

The remaining divers seemed better able to keep the secret.  A few told
family or non diver friends, while others were unwilling to risk it
even with wives.  Soon, word of Nagle's indiscretion reached
Chatterton.  He knew his friend's weakness and was not surprised.  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. Nagle mumbled that he would try.  Chatterton heard the
ice clink.  The men would need to stand guard with that much more
vigilance to prevent getting jumped on the wreck the next time out.

Two weeks was an agonizing wait for divers so alive with mystery.
Landlocked for eternity, many did the next best thing to diving- they
hit the books.

Most worked independently from their homes or local libraries.  They
consulted area shipwreck chronicles, U-boat histories, and World War II
naval records.  Their strategy: find any submarines recorded sunk
anywhere near where the mystery wreck lay.  Two U-boats leaped from the
pages.

In April 1944, Allied forces sank U550 at a location of 40 09"N
latitude and 69 44"W longitude.  Those numbers sounded distinctly New
Jersey to the divers.  They rushed to their navigational charts and
traced their fingers along the lats and longs until they reached a
point about a hundred miles north of the mystery wreck's general
location, still in New Jersey waters but not a great match.  Still, no
one had ever found U-550.  To most of the divers, the hundred-mile
discrepancy might be explainable; perhaps U-550's sinking location

was recorded imprecisely; perhaps U-550 had only been wounded by Allied
forces and then limped underwater to the mystery wreck site before
sinking.  Perhaps anything-U-550 was the only submarine recorded sunk
in New Jersey waters.  She became the divers' odds-on favorite.

Close behind was U-521, which had been sunk in June 1943 at a position
of approximately 37 43"N latitude and 73 16^ longitude.  Again, the
divers consulted their navigational charts.  This location lay in
Virginia waters, about ninety miles east of Chincoteague Bay.  Though
not in New Jersey waters, the site was just 120 miles south of the
mystery wreck.  As with U-550, the divers considered such a
discrepancy to be explainable.  As with U-550, the U-521 remained
undiscovered.

Divers called each other breathlessly to announce their findings: it is
either U-550 or U-521-no doubt about it.

Yurga sent a letter to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. He
made this request: "I'd like all the information you have on U-boats,
please," then gave his name and address.

A week later, Yurga received a letter from an archivist.

"Mr.  Yurga, we have forty-three linear feet of floor-to-ceiling
shelves of U-boat documents.  This does not include drawings, just
text.  Perhaps you might be interested in visiting here to do your
research."

For his part, Nagle had done a bit of research into U-550 and U-521.
He trembled with excitement as he digested these stories and processed
their implications.  Both U-boats had been reported sunk relatively
close to the mystery wreck site.  Neither U-boat had ever been found.
To Nagle, this was proof that the submarine they had discovered was
either U-550 or U-521.  He phoned Chatterton and asked him to drop by
the Seeker after work.

Around dusk, Chatterton pulled into the Horrible Inn's parking lot.
Nagle was on the Seeker's back deck, standing watch over the pile of
research papers he had accumulated.

"John, come on board, you gotta see this," Nagle called to him.  "Are
you ready for some stories?"

For the next hour, Nagle walked Chatterton through the sinkings of
U-550 and U-521.  With each detail, Chatterton became more convinced
that neither U-boat was the mystery sub.  When Nagle finished,
Chatterton shook his head.

"Bill, no way."

"What do you mean, no way?"

"It's not either of those U-boats."

"The hell you mean?  Why not?"

"Bill, look at the reported sinking location for U-550.  It's a hundred
miles from our location.  That is a huge distance-"

"The Allies must have gotten the location wrong," Nagle interrupted.
"It was the heat of battle.  Someone made a mistake.  A slip of the
pen-"

"Didn't happen, Bill.  You've got three destroyers there.  They agree
on the location-look at these attack reports.  Are you telling me that
three separate warships made three separate but identical mistakes? Are
you telling me these destroyers knew how to find Northern Ireland but
couldn't accurately record their location in American waters?"

Nagle breathed hard for a minute but said nothing.  Chatterton shrugged
his shoulders in apology.  Nagle's eyes grew angry.

"Well, then our wreck must be U-521," Nagle said.  "If it's not the
550, it's the goddamned 521."

"It's not the 521 either," Chatterton said.  "Again, we're talking
about a United States Navy ship relatively close to the coast.  Are we
supposed to believe that the navy can't tell if they're off Baltimore
or Brielle?  The navy can't tell where they are?  How can you be sixty
miles offshore and not know where you are?"

The veins in Nagle's forehead popped out.

"Okay, wiseass!  Which U-boat is it then?"

"I don't know, Bill.  But I'm pretty damn sure it's neither one of
those."

A few days later, Chatterton decided to take a trip.  Chicago's Museum
of Science and Industry was the permanent home of U-505, a type IXC
U-boat captured by the Allies off Africa in 1944.  The sub

marine had been kept in pristine condition and was open to the
public.

"I want to walk through the submarine and feel it," Chatterton told his
wife, Kathy.  "I know nothing about U-boats.  But I want to go inside,
stand in it, and absorb things."

The airlines demanded a fortune to fly midweek with no notice.
Chatterton paid it.  He would take a day off from work, stay in Chicago
for several hours, then fly home the same night.

Chatterton arrived at O'Hare airport on Wednesday, September 18.  Only
three days remained until the Seeker's return to the wreck site.  He
took a taxi to the gargantuan museum and followed signs inside to the
U-boat.  He stood in line alongside restless schoolchildren on field
trips, vaguely interested retirees, and a few military buffs.  Then he
calculated how many times he might repeat this tour before his return
flight to New Jersey.

CHAPTER FOUR

CHATTERTON

In WAYS, it amazed Chatterton that he was still alive to visit museums.
He had lived a life of startling decisions, many of which he'd known
could kill him, and all of which would have been unfathomable to the
tourists with whom he stood in line.  Now that he^ was forty years old,
married, and ideally employed, his past sometimes seemed to belong to
someone else.  Still, in unexpected places like this museum, small
things hurtled him back in time.  Drab gray paint on a waiting area
display evoked 1970, a year that still lived hot in his bloodstream.
Photos of a giant ocean hung on nearby walls tossed him onto the waters
of an unlikely boyhood.  Today, he might have looked like everyone else
standing beside him.  But none of them had come close to a life like
his.

That life began on a leafy September in 1951, when Jack and Patricia
Chatterton welcomed their first child into their lives.  The scene was
1950s perfect: Jack was a Yale-educated, up-and-coming aerospace
engineer for the Sperry company, a fantastical-sounding job in an era
when the word aerospace conjured images of Martians and death rays.
Patricia was a twenty-four-year-old, newly retired fashion model who
had twirled her willowy shape and waterfall of brown hair on
international runways.

When John was three, his family moved to a new ranch-style home

in Garden City, a tony Long Island suburb populated by Manhattan
executives, local business owners, and jockey Eddie Arcaro.  Few could
imagine a better place to raise a child.  Garden City was safe and
quiet, its tract homes and color televisions promising Americans a new
and better way of living.

When John was four, Patricia gave birth to another son, Mac Rae named
for Patricia's father.  As the boys grew into school age, Garden City's
fortunes grew with them.  Four Long Island Railroad stations served the
town in a time when most communities were lucky to get one.  The
Chattertons enjoyed a large TV and electric heat.  John's bicycle had
training wheels that didn't squeak.

Patricia made the beach her priority.  She drove her two boys forty
minutes to Gilgo Reach, along a stretch of barrier islands off the
South Shore of Long Island.  There, she turned John and Mac Rae 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. 
John's father never joined the family there.  He was busy.  He didn't
like sand and salt water.

It was the salt water that gave John his feeling.  At home, he was
thrilled by little.  School was okay.  Books were so-so.  Mickey Mantle
was all right.  But when he stood in the Atlantic up to his knees and
looked out over the horizon, he felt as if he could see a different
world, a world that no one talked about.  At home, he would push his
T-shirts against his face and smell the salt water, and that also gave
John his feeling.

At home, John's life was different from those of his friends.  His
mother spoke to him without filters, expressing viewpoints without
dumbing down her ideas or dialogue.  John's father liked to have fun,
but not the ball-tossing, fishing-trip recreation that television
fathers favored.  Jack would spend hours behind his desk at home,
studying aerospace equations and smoking through his daily four packs
of Kents.  Two martinis, and he was ready to put on a gorilla mask and
run around the neighborhood.

When Jack began to drink heavily, Patricia tried to coax him into
becoming a proper father.  He countered by upping his working, smoking,
and drinking.  Patricia decided then that as long as her own father was
still alive, she was going to leave Jack out of things.

Patricia's father was Rae Emmet Arison, a retired rear admiral and navy
hero who had commanded submarines for ten years in the 1930s and led
battleships in World War II.  To Patricia, who had idolized her father
since girlhood, there was no better model of courage, decency, and
immersion in life than Admiral Arison.  He had since moved to South
Carolina-near the beach.  She arranged visits and began a campaign to
steep her boys in her father's example.

She told her sons of her father's love of submarines, about how each
man depended on every other for his life, so that the greenest enlisted
man had been as responsible for the survival of the submarine as had
her father, and she told them that her father found honor in this idea.
Occasionally, she told stories of Admiral Arison's battles in the
Pacific during World War II.  But mostly she told the boys about how
her father had distinguished himself as a man.  She told them that
after the war, her father had hobbled on crutches across America to
visit the families of every man who had perished under his command
because it was the right thing to do, that he needed to tell them in
person that he appreciated their sons.  She also told them that her
father had helped the families of enlisted men with money and
encouragement.  She told them, sometimes daily, that her father valued
excellence and persistence above all, and that life could be unlimited
for a man who aimed high and never gave up.

In third grade, John played the brave Prince in a school play.  He
wasn't the star; that was Prince Charming.  He didn't get the girl;
that was also for Prince Charming.  He got killed in the final act. but
he loved the role.  As opening night approached, he found himself
thinking, "I really am like the brave Prince.  I'm not handsome like
Prince Charming.  Girls don't really like me.  But if I have one
special thing, it's courage.  being the brave Prince is better than
being Prince Charming because I get to have courage."

As John turned ten, his parents argued constantly.  He played harder at
the beach and developed a dry sense of humor and a deep belly
laugh that stopped even adults.  "Your kid is like one of us," friends
told Patricia.  That summer, some neighbors allowed John to try their
simple scuba setup.  The tank was buoyant, so the boy could only float.
But his head was in the water and he was breathing-breathing inside
water!-and he could see rays of sunlight beaming through the water and
pointing to the bottom, and he wanted desperately to go down because he
couldn't see far enough.  But the neighbors had said no diving, so he
thought very hard while he breathed inside water.  He thought, "If I
could get down there, that is where it's happening."

One summer day when John was twelve, he and his friend Rob Denigris
hitchhiked a ride out of Garden City, an adventure still considered
safe in 1963 America.  They got fifty miles from home, to a rural
outpost in Suffolk County.  John and Rob began walking down a country
road, looking for whatever neat stuff was supposed to be on country
roads.  They came upon an old Victorian-style house.  The place
appeared abandoned: the grounds were overgrown in weeds, sloping tree
branches veiled shuttered windows, and the inside looked dark and
still, as if sunlight had stopped bothering.  The boys approached
slowly.  They had seen enough horror films to know better, yet each
believed there to be stories inside.  They tried a door.  It opened.

Upstairs, they found piles of decades-old newspapers, still unfolded,
and they sat on splintery crates and read the stories aloud to each
other, tales of strange people from another time who had concerns that
didn't entirely make sense today.  In the basement, John discovered
jars of preserved fruit-it had to be a few years' supply- and he was
struck by the optimism of these jars, that the people who'd lived here
had hoped to be around for a long time, that they had expected to enjoy
eating something sweet in the future.  The boys passed hours in the
house.  Neither considered hurting the place or disturbing its
belongings.  As dusk fell, they replaced their discoveries, even the
newspapers, in the way they had found them.

As the boys hitchhiked home, they constructed scenarios to explain the
house and its tenants: the preserves indicated the presence of a woman;
the windows had not been boarded up because the tenants had left
unexpectedly; the newspapers might have been left by a relative years
after the last people lived there.  Time disappeared while they made
these theories.

They tried to hitchhike back to the house a few days later, but could
not explain to the person who picked them up exactly where they had
been.  The boys walked a country road but came up empty.  They tried
again the next day and the next.  Each time, they failed to find the
house.

They desperately wanted to go back.  They tried a half dozen times.
They drew maps.  But they could never find it; they never knew where
they had been.  The boys hitchhiked a lot after that.  But they never
found a place that great again.

John entered Garden City High School in 1965, the year the first
marines landed at Da Nang.  He had grown into some of his tallness and,
with his short blond hair and squaring jaw, looked every week more man
than kid.  He made friends easily, especially among guys who
appreciated his wild side, a side that could hitchhike fifty miles or
rebuild a motorcycle's suicide shifter.

John's academic averageness continued in high school.  But as sophomore
year unfolded, he began to get a handle on impressions that had been
just vague companions since grade school.  Garden City was isolated, he
thought, enveloped by a protective bubble that shielded residents from
all that was going on in the rest of the world.  People's concerns
seemed small-they worried about who owned the best vacation house or
whether Dad would pop for the Auxiliary Air Spring Kit for their new
Mustang.  Neighbors claimed to favor civil rights and even went out of
their way to invoke the positives of having a "black boy" in the high
school, but there were no minorities or working-class folks living in
Garden City.

As John became an upperclassman, he continued his love affair with the
beach.  Still, he never dreamed of becoming a world-class fisherman or
a champion surfer or the next Jacques Cousteau.  Aside from his
grandfather, he had no heroes.  He didn't even have a nickname, a fact
that he believed kind of summed it up about him in high school.  But he
always thought big about the ocean.  Every time he looked at the
Atlantic he marveled at the vastness of the world that must lie beyond
Garden City.

In 1968, John's junior year, reports poured in about unthinkable war
casualties all around Vietnam.  Everyone had an opinion, and

John listened to all of them.  But the more John absorbed these
viewpoints, the more he suspected that these people didn't really know.
It was not that he doubted their conviction; in fact, he admired their
passion and felt invigorated by the era.  But he asked himself about
the lives of the people behind the opinions, and the more he asked, the
more he became convinced that few of them had ever gone out and looked
for themselves.

By this time, John's parents had divorced and his father had moved to
California.  One evening, John's father called home and asked his son
about his future.  John knew what his dad wanted to hear-that he would
apply to Yale and then pursue a field worthy of the mind.  Instead,
John found strange words pouring out of his mouth.  He told his father
that he intended to explore the world, not as a tourist or an
intellectual, but in search of answers.  He told his father he didn't
know where he was going, just that he had to go, that he had to see for
himself.

"The hell you are!"  his father exploded.  Jack had started his own
business and had just invented the circuitry for the Bar-O-Matic, the
device that allows bartenders to pour several sodas from a single hose.
He was riding high.  He had money.  John would come work for him.

"That's your plan.  That's not my plan," John said.  "If you don't do
it, John, you will end up a common laborer."  John hung up the phone.

Early in 1969, during John's final semester of high school, a girl
attended one of his classes wearing a black arm band  B-52 bombers had
conducted recent heavy raids against targets near the Cambodian border.
American protesters were demanding that the United States leave
Vietnam.  The girl made strong statements that day; she believed in her
antiwar message.  John pictured himself as a soldier risking his life
in combat and wondered whether he would appreciate this girl and her
arm band and her fist, but he could not decide; he did not have enough
information.  And this was John's central problem in life, right there
in the classroom, right next to the girl with the arm band and students
chanting, "Right on!"  He didn't have answers.  He had never gone and
seen for himself.

John hit on an idea: the military could take him into the world; by

joining the military he could see for himself.  He asked himself if he
could kill a person or fight for a cause he might come to despise.
Again, he had no good answer.  Then he had an epiphany: he could
volunteer as a medic.  No matter how ugly things got, as a medic he
could help people instead of killing people.  He could stay positive
and still have a first-person experience with the most important
questions in the world.

He first considered the navy, his grandfather's branch.  But the navy
made provisions for the grandchildren of heroes, and John wanted no
special treatment.  Other branches would not guarantee a specialty.
Only the army promised to make a volunteer a medic in return for a
four-year commitment.  John enlisted.

In January 1970, the army assigned Private Chatterton to the
neurosurgical ward of the 249th General Hospital in Asaka, Japan.  He
was eighteen.  The ward existed for a single purpose: to treat the
horrors of war.  Every day, wounded American soldiers arrived in waves
as if coming over a hill, some missing the backs of their skulls,
others with torn spines, still others delirious or screaming for Mother
or with sideways faces.  Chatterton bathed patients, applied their
dressings, turned them in bed as they tried to recover from damage done
by ingeniously cruel weapons.  Many of the patients were Chatterton's
age.  Sometimes a soldier would look at him before surgery and say,
"I'm paralyzed, man."  On the ward, Chatterton might let his mind
wander for a moment and try to fathom life for a man suddenly without
his body at eighteen.

If a soldier had it good in 1970, that soldier was Chatterton.  He rode
trains and drank beer and dined often in Asaka's sukiyaki houses.  He
liked his work-it was emotional and important.  He was seeing the
world.  He was out of harm's way.  But as he watched the parade of
ruined lives delivered to the neuro ward, he began to ask questions
that would not go away: What caused people to do this to one another?
How is this happening to these guys?  What is going on over that
hill?

Chatterton studied the wounded.  Mostly he watched their eyes as
doctors explained about wheelchairs and breathing tubes, and

their eyes always seemed to stare straight ahead, as if the men were
looking through the doctor.  To Chatterton, these soldiers were not
"Charge of the Light Brigade" types.  They looked stunned, afraid,
lonely.  But they also looked like they knew something Chatterton did
not know.

As months passed and busloads of neurosurgical patients poured through
the 249th, Chatterton's questions grew more urgent.  He devoured
newspapers, read books, and sought out conversations, but those sources
only told him about politics; they couldn't explain how the world could
have come to this.  He got the feeling again, the same one he'd had on
the beach as a boy, that he would have to go see for himself.

Chatterton began telling friends that he might request a transfer to
Vietnam.  Their response was immediate and unanimous: "Are you fucking
crazy?"  He tested the idea on his superiors.  They pleaded with him to
reconsider and explained that neurosurgical ward duty was among a
soldier's highest callings.  He told them that this was not about
patriotism or anything noble like that-he just needed to understand.
Even the wounded pleaded with Chatterton.  "Don't go, man-it's a big
mistake," they said.  A paralyzed soldier told him, "Stay here, do your
time, and go home.  I'm wasted, but you're still good and you gotta
stay good."  But Chatterton requested the transfer.  In June 1970, he
was on an airplane to Chu Lai in South Vietnam.

Chatterton was assigned to the 4th Battalion 31st Infantry of the
Americal Division.  When he landed, he was told to report to the
battalion aid station on a firebase near the Laotian border, a place
called LZ West.  He reached the firebase late that morning.

Around noon, a telephone rang on the base.  A man answered, said
nothing for a moment, then mumbled, "Shit" into the receiver.  Soon
everyone on the base began scrambling.  An administrative officer
called to Chatterton, "Get your gear!  A medic in the field just got
killed getting off a helicopter.  You're taking his place."  Chatterton
wasn't sure if he heard the guy correctly.  He was replacing a dead
medic?  On a helicopter?  In the field?  Then the same man began to sob
and his eyes went wild, a look Chatterton had seen on those suffering
nervous breakdowns in the Japanese hospital.

Chatterton stood in place as men grabbed weapons and gear and zigzagged
around him.  He did not know where to go or what to do.  A minute
later, a smallish man with scruffy brown hair grabbed his arm and told
him, "Listen, I'm a medic, too.  I'll get you ready to go out there."
The medic looked old, at least twenty-four.  He introduced himself as
"Mouse."

"Follow me," Mouse said.

Mouse led Chatterton to a bunker on the firebase.  It would be a few
hours before the helicopter arrived to take Chatterton into the jungle.
Until then, Mouse said he would show Chatterton the ropes.  "If you
want, man, we can talk while we work," he said.

In the bunker, Mouse stuffed Chatterton's aid bag with the field
medic's tools-malaria pills, tetracycline, morphine, IV, tape,
scissors, field dressings-and explained the jungle way to use them all,
unhappy methods more sudden than Chatterton had learned in the
hospital.  In between, he spoke to Chatterton of Vietnam.

"I hate the war," Mouse said.  "But I'm here.  I do everything I can
for the men.  I'm here to be a good medic.  The war is irrelevant to
me.  Over here, being a good medic is my life."

Mouse labeled the malaria and dysentery pills, pulled buckles around
Chatterton's gear, and told him to carry a small aid bag in addition to
the larger one thought sufficient by average medics.  On patrol, he
told Chatterton, a great medic separates his trauma supplies from the
allergy and stomach-cramp shit-you don't lug antihistamines to treat a
bullet wound to the head.

"These guys are your responsibility," Mouse continued.  "For me, I have
to do right by my men.  That's the only thing that matters- the men.
They're the only thing."

Chatterton asked Mouse about the .45-caliber pistol he kept on his
hip-didn't field medics arm themselves better than that?

"A lot of medics carry a rifle or machine gun," Mouse said.  "The only
reason I carry a weapon at all is to protect a guy who's down.  I'm not
willing to let the enemy finish a guy I'm treating just because I'm
unarmed.  But  I won't carry an offensive weapon.  I'm no warrior.  I
leave the heavy stuff behind.  It's symbolic in a way.  It reminds me
why I'm here."

For the next two hours, Chatterton lost himself in Mouse's philosophy.
Mouse had ideas about courage and dedication and conviction that
Chatterton had known were true but could never enunciate. For those two
hours, Chatterton forgot that his life would be on the line that day.

A helicopter arrived.  Someone shouted, "Let's go!"  Mouse helped stuff
hand grenades and a poncho into Chatterton's pack, then quizzed him a
final time on which pill treated which ailment.  Chatterton grabbed his
helmet.  He strapped a .45-caliber pistol to his hip.  "One more
thing," Mouse said.  "A lot of the stuff you do out there, you're going
to have to live with all the way down the line.  You'll have to make
decisions out there.  When that happens, you have to ask yourself,
"Where do I want to be in ten years, twenty years?  How will I want to
feel about this decision when I'm an old man?  "That's the question for
making important decisions."

Chatterton nodded and shook Mouse's hand.  Mouse would remain at the
base.  Chatterton wondered if he would see this man again.  He could
only think to say, "Thanks a lot, Mouse.  Goodbye."  Then he climbed
into the chopper and sat on a case of C rations-no seats, no seat
belts-and the machine lifted away, disappearing above the trees and
into the sun on its way to the real Vietnam.

The helicopter released Chatterton and several boxes of supplies in the
jungle, then disappeared back into the sky.  For what seemed an
eternity, there was no one else there.  Finally, Chatterton heard
rustling behind a patch of trees.  He turned toward the sound to see a
dozen men emerging from the jungle, Western men with filthy faces, long
hair, and scraggly beards.  To Chatterton, it appeared as if a
California motorcycle gang had materialized in Vietnam.  The men walked
toward him dressed in torn olive T-shirts and shredded pants.

None wore a helmet or flak jacket or other military garb.  As they came
nearer, it seemed to Chatterton that each soldier carried the same
expression, the look of a man who could no longer be surprised.

The soldiers broke open the supply boxes and began to outfit
themselves.  None said a word to Chatterton, including another medic
assigned to the company command post.  Every so often, one of them
would glance up at Chatterton with a tired disgust that was

an unmistakable subtitle in Vietnam: You don't know shit.  You won't be
around long.  If we need help, you probably won't deliver.  As the men
finished packing, one of them grunted to Chatterton, "Let's go."  The
men made up a small platoon.  They were on the move to a new location.
While in transit, they were to hunt and kill North Vietnamese as
necessary.  The group walked into the jungle.  Chatterton walked with
them in the single-file line.

The men crossed rice paddies, swatted bird-sized insects, slogged
through alligator-infested rivers, stepped over a machine-gunned
buffalo.  An hour into the jungle, shots rang out.  The platoon hit the
ground.  Chatterton was the last man down.  Bullets polka-dotted the
dirt around them.  Chatterton believed his heart was going to explode.
When the shooting stopped, he looked around.  The expressions on the
faces around him had remained exactly as they were when he'd first seen
them.  Minutes later the men resumed walking.  Chatterton pulled
himself together and joined them.  When his breath returned and his
brain began working again, he thought to himself, "These guys are
crazed killers.  Nobody is talking to me.  Where the hell am I?  What
have I done?"

The platoon spent the evening under a sweltering moon.  While the
others slept, Chatterton lay awake.  At dawn, he saw a tiger disappear
into the jungle.  The next day, as the temperature broke one hundred
degrees, the platoon arrived on the outskirts of an abandoned village.
Reports indicated enemy soldiers in the vicinity.  Other than
Chatterton, the men in the platoon were heavily armed and primed for
such a confrontation, none more so than John "Ace" Lacko, a
twenty-eight-year-old New Jersey paperhanger whom Chatterton had pegged
as the platoon's top dog.  Lacko, six foot two and 220 pounds, was
completing his third tour, an old-timer by Vietnam standards.  He
carried an M-60 machine gun with seven hundred rounds crisscrossed on
assault straps slung over his chest-the era's definition of locked and
loaded.  Lacko had earned the nickname "Ace" for the black playing card
he was said to leave on the chests of the enemies he had killed.

The platoon walked single file as they began the patrol.  Before long,
they came to a dried-up rice paddy that looked to provide easy passage
through the otherwise hilly terrain.  They entered the open

area, scanning the hillside for the enemy.  About fifty yards into the
clearing, Lacko stepped up onto a rock to get a better view of the
surroundings.  Shots rang out from a hillside forward left.  Five
rounds, two of them armor-piercing, tore through Lacko's left hip and
traveled clear through to his right hip.  Stunned, he placed his gear
on the ground and lay down, partially camouflaging himself in the
two-foot grass.  Blood began flowing from his wounds.  The rest of the
platoon turned back and took cover behind a ten-foot pile of dirt and
rocks back near the opening to the field.  Someone yelled, "Ace is hit!
Medic!  Medic!"  Chatterton and the other medic crawled forward.  They
could see Lacko's outline in the grass about fifty yards away.  He was
in the open, a clear target.  The enemy would not finish him; they were
likely waiting for a medic to run out, giving them two kills for the
price of one.

The platoon's other medic, Chatterton's superior, hugged close to the
protective cover made by the wall of dirt.

"Fuck it, I'm not going out there," he told Chatterton.  The platoon
could only glare at the man.  As for Chatterton, they expected him to
do even less.  No greenhorn on his second day in Vietnam was going to
run onto a shooting range.  "I'll get him," Chatterton said.

The platoon went silent.  No one was more surprised than Chatterton. He
began to remove his gear, all except for the small aid bag Mouse had
packed for him.

"Christ, the kid's gonna go," someone said.

The platoon began to take position to provide cover fire.  With each
moment, Chatterton's vision narrowed and the jungle sounds compressed,
until the only impressions in his world were his own heaving breaths
and pounding heart.  Chatterton had contemplated moments like this at
the hospital in Japan.  He believed that if he was ever faced with such
a decision, he could call upon the lessons of his grandfather.  Now, as
he readied himself to make the naked run to Lacko, he thought to
himself, "I'm going to find out what I am."

Chatterton sprinted into the open.  A barrage of gunfire rang from the
hillside far left.  Bullets sprayed dirt around Chatterton, but he kept
running.  Halfway to his man, he could see Lacko lying in the grass. 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.

"I was laying there and the numbness and shock were setting in," Lacko
recalls today.  "And I see this new guy, here comes this new guy, and
he's coming with everything he's got.  I didn't know him at all, didn't
even know his name.  But he put himself right in the line of fire.  The
guy was risking his life."

Chatterton took cover in the grass beside Lacko.  Bullets tore up the
ground around them.  Chatterton reached into his supply bag for
scissors, slit Lacko's pants top to bottom, and looked for arterial
damage.  There was none.  Lacko could be moved immediately.  Now
Chatterton had to get him back to the protection of the dirt wall, a
distance of fifty yards that seemed to stretch across all Vietnam.

Chatterton considered throwing Lacko over his shoulders, but the
wounded soldier outweighed him by fifty pounds.  Chatterton sat on the
ground behind Lacko and took his arms.  More shots hit the dirt where
they lay.  Chatterton began pushin^his legs backward in order to drag
Lacko backward a body length at a time, all the while waiting for a
bullet to strike him.  Two minutes later they were halfway to the dirt
wall; by now the platoon had pinpointed the source of the enemy fire
and was beating back the attack on Chatterton and Lacko.  Soon the men
were ten feet from the wall, then five feet, then behind it.  Soldiers
rushed to them.  Moments later, two American Cobra attack helicopters
swooped in and unleashed hellfire on the enemy hillside.  A Huey
medevac chopper followed the Cobras in and airlifted Lacko, now in
shock, to the hospital.

As the Huey disappeared, Chatterton collapsed to the ground.  He was
dehydrated and exhausted.  He scarcely knew where he was.  But he could
see that something had changed in the men.  They spoke to him.  They
rubbed his shoulders.  They smiled at him.  They called him "Doc."

As the platoon moved through the jungle, some of the soldiers might
have wondered about the shelf life of Chatterton's courage.  American
medics in Vietnam walked in uniquely dangerous boots when they
accompanied a squad on combat patrol.  Because their job was to aid
wounded soldiers, medics often found themselves running directly to
where the action was hottest-around land mines, in the line of sniper
fire, and over booby traps.  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.

In the days following Lacko's shooting, Chatterton volunteered for
every patrol available to the platoon.  The men chuckled and clapped
him on the back and explained that a medic who walked every patrol
would be pulling an impossible and deadly load.  Something was rumbling
inside Chatterton.  He had been excellent on his first patrol, and the
feeling of success was overwhelming to him.  He could not imagine
turning away from the first thing in his life at which he had been
special, the thing at which he might be great.

Every day for the next two weeks, Chatterton walked patrol with his
platoon.  Every day, the men took fire.  Chatterton always went to get
the wounded guy.  And he always went the same way.  While most medics
picked and crawled along the dirt to minimize their profiles,
Chatterton just up and hauled ass, all six foot two of him, to hell
with enemy gunfire.  Soon enough, "Doc" had developed a reputation more
important than any medal or honor could confer.  Doc, the men said, was
a crazy motherfucker.

Chatterton had been with the platoon for about two weeks when word came
down: Mouse had been killed.  His squad had taken prisoners and Mouse
had been asked to watch the captives.  An enemy sniper crept up on the
location and looked for a target.  He might have chosen one of several
Americans in range.  But Mouse, carrying his .45-caliber pistol,
appeared different from the rest-to the enemy, he likely appeared as an
officer.  The sniper lined up Mouse in his sights and pulled the
trigger, hitting the medic several times.  If Chatterton had retained
any illusion about Vietnam, such folly vaporized with Mouse's killing.
He traded in his .45 pistol for an M-16 rifle.  He had come to Vietnam
looking for answers about America and about mankind, and suddenly those
answers seemed

obvious: America was wrong to be in Vietnam; men killed one another
because they are animals.  So he had his answers, big fucking deal. Yet
Chatterton still found himself volunteering for every patrol and
running for every wounded guy, and when he sat against trees to catch
his breath he marveled at how full life felt when a person got to be
excellent, and he began to wonder if he might have come to Vietnam to
answer questions of a different kind.

"People talked about this kid Chatterton," says Dr.  Norman Sakai, the
battalion surgeon.  "I hadn't met him yet.  But the first thing you
heard about him was that he walked point.  That seemed unbelievable to
me.  Medics weren't supposed to engage in war.  Even going on patrol
was stretching it for a medic.  But walking point?  You never heard of
a medic walking point.  I thought maybe this guy was crazy.  But people
said no, he was different.  People talked about him all the time."

As weeks turned to months and Chatterton continued to distinguish
himself, he studied himself and others in action, watched soldiers live
and die and show courage and break down, paid careful attention to the
behavior of men around him, all to divine further insight into the
right way to live.  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.  As he neared the
end of his six-month field obligation, he had come to believe these
things:

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.

Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an
intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives
with these decisions forever.

Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you.

It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest
sense of right and wrong.

The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous.  The guy who
doesn't care anymore, who has said, "I'm already dead-the fact that I
live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the
accounting I give of myself," is the most formidable force in the
world.

The worst possible decision is to give up.

For four months, Chatterton thought about the right way and the wrong
way to live, and he continued to contemplate his principles.  As one
patrol bled into another and men died, his thinking solidified, and he
began to consider that it might have been for these insights that he
had come to Vietnam, that when he had looked into forever over the
Atlantic as a child and felt sure that there was more on the other
side, it was these ideas that were calling him, ideas about how a man
should live.

In June 1971, after completing his twelve-month tour, Chatterton
returned home to begin a two-week leave before returning to Vietnam for
a voluntary six-month extension.  His mother was stunned at the sight
of him.  Her son would not sit in a chair or sleep on a bed but would
exist only on the floor.  He ate off a cocktail table while sitting
cross-legged on the ground.  When she asked him to speak, he said
nothing for a while, then sobbed and told her about men missing the
backs of their heads and screaming for their mothers, about starving,
about the first time he'd killed someone, about seeing the worst things
a person could see.  He would go quiet again after that.

His mother picked up the phone and called a family friend with military
clout.  Chatterton never made it back to Vietnam.  He was reassigned to
the dispensary at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn and developed a bad
attitude.  The army referred him to a psychiatrist, where he pretended
to be what they wanted him to be until they certified him as healthy.
He married a girl he knew from high school, realized it was a mistake,
and had the marriage annulled a few months later.  Such was his routine
for two years-punching the clock, feeling angry and confused, wondering
about his future- until he had completed his four-year obligation to
the army.  Then Chatterton decided to leave everything.

Chatterton spent the years from 1973 to 1978 trying to find a niche. He
lived in Florida, where he tried hospital work and attended college.
After his father died of a heart attack in 1976 at age forty-eight, he
moved to New Jersey and started a small construction business in the
resort town of Cape May.  None of this work afforded him the feeling of
excellence he had realized in Vietnam, a feeling missing from his life
since he'd returned to the States.

In the spring of 1978, Chatterton walked to the Cape May docks and
approached an acquaintance for a job on a local scallop-fishing boat. A
day later he was at sea.  The men explained the business: The boat
dragged two ten-foot-wide steel dredges along the ocean floor.  Every
half hour, the dredges would be hauled up and the contents of their
attached bags emptied onto the deck.  The crew would dig through the
buffet of things that lived in the ocean, pull the scallops out, and
throw the remaining junk overboard.  Then the men would take the
scallops into the cutting house and shuck them.  When Chatterton asked
which of these jobs would be his, the men replied, "All of them."

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, an instinct that resonated inside him.  He ate like a king from
scruffy-bearded cooks who knew scallops and lobster more intimately
than chefs at five-star Parisian restaurants.  But the part that moved
him was watching the ocean floor come to life on the deck.  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.  And shipwreck
artifacts.  Lots of shipwreck artifacts.  The other crewmen viewed such
artifacts as garbage.  To them, scallops equaled money; everything else
equaled shit that you kicked over the side.  To Chatterton, the
everything else was the only thing.

The boat captain paid Chatterton three thousand dollars and a ten-pound
bag of scallops for the nine-day trip, a king's ransom in 1978. Better,
Chatterton now had a place on the boat.  He made several more trips
that year, some lucrative, others a flop, none without a treasure chest
of ocean artifacts to coax his mind into scenarios.

He began to tote home items until his place looked like a B-movie
pirate ship-his television atop a lobster trap, a whale skull on the
wall, whale bones on the roof, a Russian fishing net strung across the
ceiling and booby-trapped to fall on visitors as they entered through
the front door.

For two years, Chatterton earned a handsome living and learned the sea
as a scallop fisherman.  He often vowed to go scuba diving, but his
intense and unpredictable work schedule prevented it.  Chatterton
promised himself that when things lightened up, he would strap on the
tanks and really see the ocean.

In 1980, flush from another successful scallop run, Chatterton met
Kathy Caster, a co-owner of a tiny dockside restaurant in Cape May.  He
knew he was interested in Kathy before they finished their first drink.
While many women Chatterton knew had locked on to safe and predictable
paths, Kathy's life had been creative and open-ended.  She had grown up
in nearby Atlantic City but had fled to test the California life after
graduating from high school.  She wore peasant dresses, a sheepskin
coat, Stevie Nicks blond hair, and one-day-at-a-time cool.  When people
talked about Woodstock, she told them she had not only attended the
festival but had lived in the town, too.

Chatterton loved her pragmatism perhaps most of all.  Kathy did not go
in for the girly activities typical of many women he knew.  She
disliked beauty shops and thought shopping boring.  She preferred
active sports and the outdoors, and respected that Chatterton made his
living on the seas, with his hands.

And Kathy did not seem frightened by him.  He was twenty-nine years old
but had no college plans.  He went to sea for weeks at a time in
terrible storms.  He was nowhere close to finding himself.  Caster
respected these qualities.  When Chatterton told her he wasn't sure
where he was going in life, she told him she believed in him.

Kathy and Chatterton moved in together.  He bought her a .380 pistol to
keep in the home for protection while he was out at sea.  At the
shooting range, he admired her facility with a gun; she had never fired
a weapon before, but the bull's-eyes on the targets kept exploding.
This was his kind of girl.  Neither seemed in any hurry to

marry or have children, and the union felt relaxed and open-ended.  "If
a woman can put up with these whale bones," Chatterton thought, "I
think she can put up with me."

The couple had lived together for less than a year when, in 1981, the
bottom fell out of the scallop market and Chatterton's earnings
plummeted.  Kathy's restaurant had closed, leaving the couple
financially strained.  Chatterton signed up for a grueling
seventeen-day trip.  When the captain wrote him a check for $85 at the
end, he knew it was time to quit the scallop business.

At home, he and Kathy discussed the future.  His G.I. Bill benefits
expired in a year, in 1983, so if he intended to go back to school he
needed to do it now.  Chatterton found computers fascinating and
figured them to be the future.  He enrolled in a programming course and
was given a starting date.

On the eve of the first class, Chatterton awoke from his sleep and sat
bolt upright in bed.  He shook Kathy until she awakened.  She thought
he was having a nightmare or a Vietnam flashback.  She grabbed him
without turning on the lights.

"Kathy, Kathy, Kathy-"

"John, what's wrong?"

"I can't become a computer programmer."

"What are you saying?"

"I can't spend my life sitting under fluorescent lights."

"Okay, okay.  You have to be happy, John."

"I know what I'm going to do now.  I'm going to be a commercial
diver."

"What's that?"

"I don't exactly know.  I don't know yet, but it just feels right to me
... a commercial diver."

He fell back to sleep content.

Chatterton did not know what commercial divers did or where they
worked.  But he felt like the clouds had parted and the rays were
coming down.  The next day, he rushed out to buy an issue of Skin Diver
magazine.  Inside were ads for commercial diving schools.  Now the idea
seemed perfect.  He had experience in carpentry, steel working
respiratory medicine, and diving.  He was a natural in the water.  A
school in Camden offered classes.  Two

months later he drove his purple Gremlin to that school to pursue his new dream.

Chatterton had been in class just a few minutes before he concluded that commercial diving was indeed his calling. The instructor said commercial divers made a career of one-of-a-kind jobs, improvising and solving problems on the spot, working in hostile and rapidly changing environments. Chatterton could barely sit still. This was the setup under which he remembered being great in Vietnam.

He took to the muscular tools of the trade-the twenty-five-pound Desco Pot helmet made of spun copper, the air hoses that connected the diver to topside air generators, the thick neoprene gloves, the dry suit-all of it felt like a second skin. As the four-month course wore on, Chatterton wondered how he had ever gone so long without knowing a man could get paid for diving.

After graduation, Chatterton signed on with a commercial diving outfit that worked in New York Harbor. In his first month he made perhaps fifty dives, each unique in its setting and challenge. 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."

Chatterton faced immense problems in the waters beneath Manhattan. He often worked in zero visibility-in tunnels or caves or under structures so dense in silt and sediment that he could not see his own glove pressed against his face mask. He was asked to pretzel himself into inhuman spaces, then do detailed work inside. His thick neoprene gloves short-circuited his tactile sense. In winter, his dry suit became Saran Wrap in the freezing New York Harbor waters. Overnight tides worked like vandals to undo his daily progress.

At home, Chatterton told Kathy, "This job was made for me." He felt centered in the water, relaxed when straitjacketed between steel beams, at peace even without his eyes. He volunteered for everything, an act that felt like an old friend.

Chatterton liked to challenge himself. On days when the visibility dropped to zero, he pressed his body against the crevices of his surroundings, assembling impressions from elbows, knees, neck, even fins until the work site came to life like a painting in his imagination. 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. Often, he needed only brush an ankle or a weight belt against an object to deduce that object's identity and condition. 
Chatterton's independence from eyesight freed his imagination. He began to visualize story lines for his dives, imagining how a shackle would fall if it slipped his grip, how he might reorient himself in a tunnel should a support beam crack, how he could slither out a cave's crack if the front end collapsed. Over the next year he came to believe that he could see with his mind and body as sharply as he could with his eyes, and this granted him an unteachable calm. When things went wrong in the water, even in total darkness or a crescendoing chaos, he didn't panic, because he believed he could see. Soon he was negotiating the tightest and most dangerous spaces in the commercial diving business, feeling with his body, feeling with his equipment, feeling with his tools, confident that he was safe so long as those paintings kept showing in his mind. Topside crews began to call Chatterton a natural.

In good visibility he watched everything. He studied the ways objects fell through water, the effect of current on sediment, the stages of metallic decomposition, the patterns in which water danced around man-made things, the orientation of wood chips as they became buried in sand. All of it was interesting to him. All of it, he believed, could be useful to him on future dives, even if he could not figure out how at the moment.

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, and he would not get into the water until he was satisfied that the plan accounted for every contingency.  He remembered well what happened to soldiers in Vietnam who waited until
the action started to think about how to move.  In this way he
minimized the need to make decisions underwater, where any number of
other factors could thin his judgment.

Most of all, Chatterton refused to give up.  He began to see that a
commercial diver could be a top welder, an expert demolition man, a
champion pipe fitter, but if he wasn't compelled by blood and instinct
to finish the job-no matter what-he could never be great.  "No matter
what" happened every day in commercial diving, and it was for those
moments that Chatterton lived, and it occurred to him that it was for
those moments that he had been living for a long time.  One day, he
broke the welding lens in his helmet.  Replacing it would hold up the
project.  He decided to weld without one, eyes closed-a blind welder.
The men topside just stared when Chatterton came up with the broken
lens and said, "Job's done, fellas."  Chatterton drove home grateful
that night that he had found a calling, a life's work that allowed him
to be excellent again.

By 1985, Chatterton had joined the dock builders' union, moved to
Hackensack, New Jersey, and was earning an excellent salary and
benefits as a commercial diver.  He dedicated much of his free time to
scuba diving off nearby beaches, especially at a nearby Catholic
retreat where two small shipwrecks, one steel and one wood, lay in the
shallows just a few hundred feet offshore.  Chatterton never tired of
exploring them.

The small wrecks made Chatterton want to see more.  He dropped in at a
dive shop to inquire about other nearby shipwrecks.  A clerk nodded
toward a pile of green mimeographed flyers announcing the shop's
upcoming charter schedule.  Chatterton ran his eyes over the smudged
writing, gulping wondrous names like USS Saw Diego and Mohawk and Texas
Tower.  Listed under trips for August was a name that stopped him:
Andrea Doria.  Chatterton could scarcely believe it-the Andrea Doria
was famous, it was history.  Television had made documentaries about
the wreck.  He asked the clerk if there was still space on the Andrea
Doria trip.

"The Doria is Mount Everest, buddy," the clerk told him.  "It's

only for the best.  Guys die on the Doria.  Start with something
smaller."

Chatterton signed up for charters to modest inshore wrecks.  Each trip
fascinated him for the history he envisioned attached to the ship.  He
returned from these dives so enthusiastic that Kathy found herself
signing up for diving lessons.  Together, they explored dozens of
nearby shipwrecks, and Kathy could have been content diving these
wrecks.  But Chatterton got hungry.  He decided to work toward his
scuba instructor's certificate, the most sensible way he could think of
to prepare to dive the Doria.

Late in the summer of 1985, a dive shop owner took stock of
Chatterton's passion for shipwreck diving and suggested that he join
some of the shop's more experienced divers aboard the Seeker, a charter
boat owned and run by Bill Nagle, one of the sport's legends.  The
owner told him, "Nagle can be an abrasive bastard, but you two seem to
share a certain spirit about diving."

The Seeker was revelation to Chatterton.  Nagle and his customers
carried double air tanks, sledgehammers, crowbars, backup lights, and
three knives.  They studied deck plans and traveled offshore, as far as
necessary, to explore the best wrecks.  Sometimes they even chased
sketchy numbers in hopes of finding a virgin wreck, an impulse that
floored Chatterton because it seemed so closely parallel to the spirit
of the early American explorers, a group he admired.

Nagle hardly grunted toward Chatterton on their first trips together,
but Chatterton drank in the captain.  Nagle was a pisser- that much was
clear before the boat left the dock-but he also seemed consumed with
aiming big.  Chatterton loitered closer to Nagle, always listening.
"What kind of fucking man," Nagle would growl, "says that something's
impossible?  What kind of man doesn't go look?"  Chatterton signed up
for every Seeker trip available.

On weekends aboard the Seeker in 1986, Chatterton began to notice that
the skills he had developed at work seemed to transfer naturally to the
business of shipwreck exploration.  He found himself willing to swim
into crushed and dangerous quarters because he knew he could find his
way out.  He became calm in low visibility, even as mushrooming silt
clouds turned shipwrecks black, because

he knew that his body could see.  He rolled with the unexpected- and
much was unexpected on Seeker trips-because he believed in "No matter
what."  In 1986, when Chatterton volunteered to retrieve the dead diver
from the Texas Tower, no other Tower virgin would have considered it.
Chatterton went for the guy.  Twice.

In 1987, Chatterton proposed to Kathy.  Since he had bought her a
pistol for home protection, Kathy had transformed her affinity for the
weapon into a competitive shooting career.  She traveled across the
country to matches, and was on her way to owning several national
records.  The grind was hard on the couple, reminiscent of the days
when Chatterton was at sea fishing for weeks at a time.  It made them
feel as if they were living separate lives.  They missed each other
when Kathy was on the road.

For his part, Chatterton's intense personal standards of excellence
bled into his expectations for others.  If a friend or family member or
Kathy behaved in a way that Chatterton found wanting, or even believed
something that ran counter to his core values, he might go days without
speaking to that person.  Once, a friend who had promised to help
Chatterton rake leaves at nine A.M. arrived instead at noon. Chatterton
walked away from the man, then did not speak to him for a month.  "He's
not reliable," he told Kathy.  "I can't be living like that. 
Reliability is everything."

The couple married on a diving trip to Key West.  A few months later,
Chatterton earned his scuba instructor's certificate.  He now felt
ready to challenge the Andrea Doria.  Nagle was running a five-day
marathon to the great wreck, for which Chatterton signed up and chose a
bunk.  The trip was historic and produced several museum-quality
artifacts.  The Doria was now in Chatterton's blood.  He began to dream
about the wreck.  There were places on the Doria that no diver had ever
seen, places presumed out of reach.  But what did "out of reach" really
mean?

In the early months of 1988, Chatterton began training for a return to
the Doria and asking himself why he was so drawn to shipwrecks.  As the
Doria trip drew closer, he believed he understood.  A shipwreck was a
vast repository of secrets.  Some of these secrets could be uncovered
through exploration; they came up in the form of artifacts.  Other
secrets inside the shipwreck were less tangible.

Those were secrets about the diver himself.  A shipwreck gave a man
limitless opportunity to know himself if only he cared to find out.  He
could always press further, dig deeper, find places no one had
mastered.  To Chatterton, there always seemed to be opportunity on a
shipwreck, even the simple wrecks: the opportunity to confront the
problems really worth solving, and this meant everything to him, this
was the act that made his life feel worthwhile.  He started to tell
colleagues that wreck diving had a lot to do with finding out about
yourself.

For the next three years, Chatterton owned the Doria.  He penetrated
into third class, second class, the first-class galley-all
groundbreaking achievements that for years many had thought impossible.
In a sport famous for hoarding, he gave away priceless Doria artifacts,
asking fellow divers, "How many teacups does one guy need?" 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."

As Nagle spiraled deeper into alcoholism and resentment, Chatterton
managed much of his friend's business, so that the Seeker could
remain viable.  He seemed always in good cheer, ready with a dry
one-liner and his booming baritone laugh.  Yet he was capable of
intense reactions when his sense of principle was offended.  He could
not tolerate the lazy or the immoral in others any more than he could
in himself, and pity those offenders who crossed his path.

In 1990, he got word of a dive shop owner who had removed a human bone
from the wreckage of U-853, a U-boat sunk near Rhode Island. Chatterton
phoned him.  By now, almost every diver on the East Coast knew
Chatterton's name.

"I hear you're taking bones off the 853," Chatterton said.

"Ah, yeah, I guess word gets around," the man replied.

"You got it up in your house?"

"Yeah, I do."

"What the fuck are you doing?"  Chatterton roared.

The man chuckled nervously.

"I'm not laughing," Chatterton said.

"Look, man, they were the enemy.  Fuck the Germans.  We won."

Chatterton's voice exploded through the receiver.  "I'll tell you what.
You're so proud of what you did, I'm going to call the newspapers and
have them come over and interview you.  Then you can tell them how
proud you are to be a grave robber, and everyone in the state will
appreciate what a hero you are for stealing bones.  Let's make this a
big business opportunity for you.  I'll call the newspapers right
now."

There was silence on the line.

"What do you want me to do?"  the man finally asked.

"You know what?  You fucked up.  And you fucked up bad," Chatterton
said.  "I'm on your ass now and I'm not going to get off.  Those were
sailors on that submarine.  That's a war grave you robbed.  You're
going to take that bone back and you're not going to put it on the
outside of the wreck, you're going to put it inside the wreck exactly
where you fucking found it.  And then you're going to call me back and
tell me that you did it.  And only then will I be off your ass."

A week later, word had it that the bone was back inside the
submarine.

By 1991, Nagle's drinking had made it impossible for him to dive.
Doctors told him his alcoholism would kill him.  Still, at night on the
Seeker while customers slept, Chatterton and Nagle spoke about
exploration, about how diving was really about searching, about how
beautiful it would be to find something new and important, something no
one knew was there.

CHAPTER FIVE

CRAZY DEEP

CHATTERTON STEPPED INSIDE U-505, the World War II U-boat on display at
Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry.  In every direction
fantastical mechanisms jutted from the walls and ceilings in a forest
of technology-gauges, dials, pipes, conduits, speaker tubes, plumbing,
valves, radios, sonar, hatches, switches, levers-every inch a protest
against the idea that men cannot live underwater.

The roomiest spots stretched barely four feet wide and six feet tall-
in many places, two children on the museum tour could not stand side by
side.  To pass into some sections, a crewman would have had to shimmy
headfirst through a circular steel door.  No one, including the
commander, had a bunk that looked long enough to accommodate his
body.

The audio tour in Chatterton's headphones told about life aboard a
U-boat.  Crewmen slept in three shifts on the ship's tiny bunks.  In
the forward torpedo room, the U-boat's largest compartment, perhaps two
dozen men slept, worked, and ate atop potatoes, canned goods,
containers of sausages, and up to six live torpedoes.  Rough seas often
turned U-boats like this one into bathtub toys, tossing crewmen from
their bunks and shaking the boat's single cooking pot from the galley's
dollhouse-like stove.  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.

Chatterton could see that ventilation was designed for survival, not
comfort.  U-boats quickly began to stink.  Though most U-boats had two
bathrooms, or "heads," one was usually reserved for extra provisions,
leaving the other to service as many as sixty men.  Flushing was a
subtle skill taught in training; if performed improperly, ocean water
could backwash into the boat and even sink it.  In the war's early
days, when U-boats spent much of their time on the surface, garbage was
hurled overboard.  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 Miillschuss, or "garbage shot."  Soon,
the stink on the men exceeded the stink of the garbage.  The submarine
could accommodate almost no personal effects, including wardrobes.  Few
men owned a change of underwear, opting for "whore's undies"-a single
pair of black shorts that hid the evidence of a month at sea.
Chatterton thought, "I cannot believe sixty men lived inside here for
months at a time while they terrified the world."

Chatterton moved slowly with the audio tour, pressing STOP on the
player every few seconds to orient himself and make careful mental
notes.  He studied the composition of shelves, components, gauges, and
floors, envisioning each as it might appear covered in sea anemones and
rust after fifty years on the Atlantic floor.  He craned his neck
around machinery and into off-limits areas, looking for anything-a tag,
a builder's plaque, a diary-inscribed with the U-boat's number so that
he might search for the same in New Jersey.  Everything he did annoyed
other visitors.  He blocked impassable aisles, backed up into children,
wiggled around seniors.  When a tour guide asked him to move along, he
exited the U-boat, got back in line, and waited for another turn.

The next time he only pretended to push the buttons on his tape player.
In the officers' quarters he took note of wood cabinets that might
survive a half century underwater and hold important documents.  He
stopped for a full five minutes at the chart table, pretending he could
not hear people complaining behind him.  The chart table stood beneath
shelves of navigational instruments; if he could find those instruments
on the wreck he might have a prime clue in identifying his sub.

He got into line yet again.  This time, his plan was to watch the
U-505 sink from underneath him.  Inside the boat he played movies in
his mind in which the submarine went down by gunfire, flood, internal
explosion, equipment failure.  During each movie he imagined how the
rooms in front of him would collapse, how wall-mounted instruments
might fall, how floors would accordion, how debris would billow.  He
imagined where the ship might crack to allow a diver access and which
places he most effectively might swim through.  He got into line six
more times, until he knew these movies like old Honeymooners episodes
and the tour guide smirked at Chatterton's pretension to still be using
the headphones.

At O'Hare, Chatterton bought a yellow legal pad, a pen, and a pink
highlighter and began sketching U-505.  He marked in pink the places
that might surrender identification tags or other useful artifacts.  He
made notes like this in the margins: "Builder's plaque on periscope and
made of brass-could be the thing."  As he boarded the airplane back to
New Jersey, he thought, "I accomplished what I came here for.  I got a
sense, a feeling, an impression of a U-boat."

The return trip to the mystery submarine was scheduled for Saturday,
September 21, 1991.  The crew and passenger list remained the same but
for one addition and one subtraction: Ron Ostrowski had a family
obligation and could not attend; Dan Crowell, a boat captain and
longtime Seeker crewman who had missed the first trip because of a
business obligation, joined the roster.  As the big date neared, the
divers could scarcely sit still for their anticipation.

Some divers, like Doug Roberts and Kevin Brennan, counted down the days
by safety-checking their gear and fine-tuning their setups.  Others,
like Kip Cochran, Paul Skibinski, and John Yurga,

continued to research U-boat construction and lore, hoping for some
nugget of insight that might steer them to solving the mystery.
Everyone savored the buildup.  Wreck divers spent careers dreaming of
the chance to write history.  These men were three days away.

Perhaps no one was more excited than forty-four-year-old Steve Feldman,
a top props man at CBS's television studios and the diver who had
thanked Chatterton at the end of the discovery trip.  Feldman had taken
up scuba ten years earlier after a sudden divorce had left him reeling.
Feldman had become lonely, obese, and depressed.  He chain-smoked
Parliaments.  His friends thought him a kind, unassuming man and could
not stand to watch such a person ache so deeply.  They suggested yoga,
scuba diving, working out, anything to coax him back into the world. In
his thick New York accent he would only say, "Nawww ..."

One day he forced himself to take a scuba lesson.  In the water the
world opened up.  He devoted every hour of free time to learning the
sport.  His weight dropped and his face returned-handsome Mediterranean
features with a thick black mustache and gleaming blue eyes.  He quit
smoking and joined a gym, all to make himself a better diver.

For the next few years, Feldman kept his diving shallow and warm.  The
sport transformed him.  The water was a more basic world to him, a
place in which a man could be what he was meant to be.  He found a
girlfriend.  He made himself a regular on Captain Paul Hepler's
Wednesday "bug runs," then cooked the lobster he bagged for stagehands
and soap opera actors back at the CBS kitchen.  He bought a tent so
that he could change into his gear on winter beach dives.

Soon he was diving shipwrecks.  He rarely ventured deeper than 100 feet
and he penetrated wrecks only superficially, but he was hooked on the
history that wafted from these ships.  He began to sign up for as many
wreck dives as he could find.  Like many New Yorkers, he owned no car,
so he often stood on the street outside his apartment at Ninety-seventh
Street between Central Park West and Columbus, two hundred pounds of
scuba gear on his back and by his sides, trying to flag down a taxi,
most of which would slow down to inspect the martian like figure before
speeding away.  Feldman's

friends loved the image, but most of all they loved the delight he took
in watching the cab drivers' faces as they passed him by, and they
loved that this never upset him, even while he waited in the rain.

Feldman arrived at charter boats in what became his trademark uniform:
wearing a baseball cap with no logo, jeans, and a T-shirt, and carrying
a large takeout container of Cantonese noodles with peanut sauce.  No
matter how high the seas, no matter how brutal the dive, Feldman always
ate those noodles, and the empty box in the garbage can became a sure
sign on a charter that "Feld" had been along for the ride.

Before long, Feldman had made himself into an instructor.  He made
deeper wreck dives-to 120 feet, even to 170 feet once-but stayed mostly
shallow and warm, allowing the heavy hitters of the sport to tackle the
crazy stuff on the eastern seaboard.  When Paul Skibinski, a buddy he
knew from Hepler's bug runs, invited him along to chase Bill Nagle's
numbers, he leaped at the chance.  The names Nagle and Chatterton and
Seeker were legend in the area; this was his chance to dive with the
best.

Feldman returned from the discovery trip transformed.  He had splashed
shoulder to shoulder with the big shoes.  He had touched bottom at 230
feet, far deeper than he had ever dreamed for himself.  He was part of
a secret group on the lip of history.  And he might be the one to
identify the wreck.  On the Saturday afternoon of the return trip to
the submarine, he bought a large box of Cantonese noodles with peanut
sauce and lugged his diving gear onto the street.  A decade ago he had
been lost.  Now, as taxi drivers gawked and passed him by, he felt like
he was going exactly where he should be going, and this was the thing
about diving to Feldman, and it always had been the thing: in the
water, self-contained, a man could be what he was meant to be, and when
that happened it was impossible to be lost.

The Seeker pushed away from its Brielle dock around one A.M. on its
journey back to the mystery U-boat.  The night was calm and made for
sleeping, but everyone stayed awake for this ride.  The divers had

it figured this way: there were thirteen divers onboard, each of whom
could make two dives; that meant twenty-six dives in which someone had
a chance to score a single piece of identification.  Today, someone
would be the man.

Only one man was not giddy.  In the wheelhouse, Nagle seemed nervous as
he adjusted the loran units and guided the Seeker out of the inlet.

"What's wrong, Bill?"  Chatterton asked.

"I'm nervous that some son of a bitch is going to jump us on the
wreck," Nagle said.  "Word has leaked out that we're on to something
big here."

"Word has leaked out, has it?"  Chatterton asked.  "Seems like it,
yeah," Nagle said.

"Well, I wonder how that happened!"  Chatterton laughed, his booming
voice carrying into the salon below.  "If you could've kept your big
mouth shut for more than a day, Bill, maybe you'd be relaxed today."

"Ah, shit.  I ain't the only one who talked."

"Look, Bill.  No one but us goes sixty miles offshore in late
September.  Bielenda and those guys aren't about doing anything
interesting.  Even if they've heard that we're doing something great,
their laziness would keep them away.  They'd want us to do all the hard
work first."

"Yeah, John, you're probably right-"

"Oh, wait!  Bill, look!"  Chatterton teased.  "There's Bielenda off to
starboard!  He's following us!"  "Go to hell."

Six hours later, the Seeker reached its destination.  The men geared
up.  Chatterton would splash first and tie in, then go about his dive.
While the other divers intended to pick a spot and search for a tag or
other piece of identification, Chatterton planned to swim the wreck,
orienting himself according to his Chicago memories, looking for
nothing but impressions.  Only when he understood a wreck did he
believe he could formulate a plan to approach it.  The strategy made it
likely that another diver would beat him to the sub's identity, but
Chatterton was willing to take the chance.  He staked much of his
diving on the principle that preparation

came first, so he would not just start digging in hopes that he might
get lucky.

Chatterton moved down the anchor line.  Visibility was decent, about
twenty feet.  As he neared the bottom, he could see that the grapple
had hooked into a metal mass lying beside the submarine in the sand.
Its rectangular shape was unmistakable-this mass was the conning tower,
the observation post that was supposed to be atop the submarine.  He
swam forward a few feet.  Now he could see the submarine.  It lay in
the sand intact and was shaped as in the photo books except for a
single, striking difference-this submarine had a gaping hole in its
side, perhaps fifteen feet high and thirty feet across.  Chatterton
understood metal.  This wound could have resulted only from a
cataclysmic event.  This wound was what had caused the conning tower to
fall and collapse in the sand.  This submarine had not gone down
peacefully.

The hole beckoned Chatterton.  He could swim inside and search the area
for identification before any of the other divers arrived, but that was
not according to plan.  He swam instead to the top of the wreck and
then turned left, studying the boat's topography and making a filmstrip
of mental notes.  As he neared the end of the wreck he came upon the
same torpedo-loading hatch he had seen on the first trip.  That
hatch, he remembered, had been on the submarine's bow; therefore, the
hole torn into the boat must be on its port side.  A picture of the
submarine began coming together in Chatterton's mind.

Chatterton reversed course and swam the other way.  He nearly reached
the stern before his dive timer ordered him back to the anchor line for
his ascent.  The other divers, the first of whom were now descending,
would certainly plunge into the hole and start digging.  But Chatterton
had gotten what he'd come for-knowledge.  He could save exploration for
his second dive, after he studied that picture in his mind and pieced
together exactly where he would be going.

As Chatterton made his way up the anchor line, the next divers reached
the wreck.  Skibinski and Feldman got inside the hole near the fallen
conning tower and began searching the debris.  Skibinski found a
foot-long tubular piece of equipment he believed might be inscribed
with a serial number.  For the next several minutes, both

he and Feldman dug in earnest, enthralled by the magnitude of promising
debris.  But both men had sworn to start up the anchor line after just
fourteen minutes, no matter how tempting the exploration.  Skibinski's
watch read thirteen minutes.  He tapped Feldman on the shoulder and
pointed up.  Feldman nodded his okay.  Skibin-ski headed for the anchor
line and began his ascent.  It had taken discipline to leave such a
wellspring of artifacts, but the men had stuck to their conservative
plan.

As Skibinski ascended he glanced down for Feldman, who appeared to be
examining something on the wreck.  "He better stop digging and get his
ass up here," Skibinski grumbled through his regulator before ascending
another few feet.  He looked down again, and this time he noticed that
there were no bubbles coming from Feldman's regulator.  Narcosis
started to hum in the background of his mind.  "Something's not right,"
Skibinski told himself.  "I gotta go down there and check."  He dropped
down the anchor line to his friend.

Skibinski grabbed Feldman and turned him around.  Feldman's regulator
fell from his mouth.  His eyes were not blinking.  Skibinski looked
deeper into his friend's mask, but Feldman just kept staring back, he
would not blink, 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 and Skibinski
screamed, "Oh, fuck!  Oh, fuck!"  and Feldman only kept staring at him
and Skibinski's head pounded harder and he breathed harder, which made
the needle on his air supply drop.

Skibinski wrapped his left arm around Feldman.  Questions whizzed
through his brain: Should I inflate Feldman's suit with air and shoot
him to the surface?  Can't do that, the bends would kill him.  Should I
leave Feldman behind and ensure my own safe and controlled
decompression'?  Can't abandon a friend, can't abandon a friend, can't
abandon a friend.  Only one option remained: he would carry Feldman
with him to the surface.  Sometimes unconscious divers snapped out of
it with ascent; he had definitely heard about that.

Still negatively buoyant, Feldman was lead in Skibinski's arm.
Skibinski pulled with all he had, gulping air as he one-armed himself
and his friend up the anchor line, Feldman arched back in the current,
arms dangling at his sides, legs slightly apart, eyes staring straight
ahead.  With each pull Skibinski grew wearier and sucked more air.  He
made it to 170 feet, 165 feet, 160.  Then he saw two divers, Brennan
and Roberts, above him coming down.

Skibinski released the anchor line to rest for just a moment.
Instantly, he and Feldman began to drift away in the current.
Skibinski, knowing that he was burning air and could go lost at sea in
a matter of seconds, began kicking furiously to regain the anchor line,
thrashing against the current until he could no longer maintain a grip
on his friend.  He let go of Feldman.  The limp diver began sinking
rapidly, all the while on his back and staring up, his mouth moving
open and closed but no bubbles coming out.

Instinctively, Roberts bolted for the body, but Feldman kept sinking.
Roberts knew that by leaving the anchor line and chasing this diver he
could go lost himself.  But it was a reaction-he could not allow
another man to drop into the abyss.  At around 200 feet, Roberts thrust
out his arm and caught hold of Feldman's harness, but the leaden diver
was so heavy that both men continued to plummet toward the sand.
Roberts righted himself and began searching desperately for Feldman's
buoyancy compensator or dry-suit inflation valve-if he could pump air
into Feldman's equipment he might better carry him toward the surface.
But Feldman was a morass of equipment, and Roberts could not find any
inflation gear under all his stuff.  Roberts pumped his own suit full
of air, but even that did not arrest the duo's plummet.  Both divers
hit bottom together.  Narcosis began to bang inside Roberts.  He looked
into Feldman's face.  He saw no life.  He could not see the wreck.  He
could not see the anchor line.  There was only sand in every direction.
"We're in the middle of nowhere," he thought.  "I'm in fucking
never-never land.  I'm lost."

As Roberts sat on the bottom alongside Feldman, a panicked Skibinski
regained the anchor line at about 160 feet.  His eyes turned giant and
he rushed toward Brennan, making the slashing-across-throat motion that
indicates a diver is out of air.  Brennan had seen the look before-this
was panic, the snowball.  Skibinski
lunged for Brennan's regulator.  Brennan backed away; he could not
allow Skibinski to kill them both.  He reached behind him for his
backup regulator and offered it to the thrashing Skibinski.  Skibinski
took it and started to gulp Brennan's reserve.  Brennan began to ascend
with Skibinski, stopping with him to do brief decompression stops at 50
feet, 40 feet, all the while thinking, "If Doug's still alive, he's
gotta be lost and freaked out.  He's alone down there risking his life
to get a guy who's already dead.  I have a responsibility to Doug.  I
gotta go get Doug."  At around 30 feet, Brennan passed Skibinski off to
another diver and bolted for the bottom to search for Roberts, thereby
making himself a prime candidate to go lost.

Sitting in the sand with Feldman at ocean's bottom, Roberts checked his
gauges; he had burned 60 percent of his air supply struggling with
Feldman.  If he stayed much longer he would incur a decompression
obligation beyond his remaining air.  Feldman's body lay next to him in
the sand, mouth and eyes agape.  Roberts's peripheral vision narrowed
with his crescendoing narcosis-he could now see only in front of him.
He thought, "If I don't get out of here fast, there will be two of us
dead on the bottom."  The anchor line was nowhere in sight.  He would
have to swim for the surface, even though that meant that he would
likely be blown miles from the Seeker by the time he surfaced.  He
could only pray that someone topside would see him bobbing on the waves
before he went lost at sea and drowned.

Just before ascending, Roberts began to tie a line to Feldman.  That
way, if anyone found his body, they could find Feldman, too.  He
strained to wrap the line around Feldman, but his motor skills were
blunted and he could not make a good knot.  He tried again.  Finally,
he secured the line and began his ascent.

Roberts did not know exactly how long he had been on the bottom.  He
ascended.  At 100 feet the first trickles of light began to spackle the
ocean around him, and he saw a miracle.  Somehow, in his ascent, he had
been blown back into the Seeker's anchor line, a huge long shot.  He
tied the thin nylon rope that led to Feldman to the anchor line, then
improvised a decompression stop.  Brennan reached him moments later.
The two of them made their way to the surface.

Brennan climbed aboard the Seeker first.  Chatterton and Nagle saw him
coming up the ladder and figured something was wrong- he had been in
the water only a short time.

"There's a problem," Brennan said, pulling off his mask.  "There's a
guy dead on the wreck.  I think it's Feldman."

Chatterton called to Steve Lombardo, a physician who had yet to splash,
and asked him to stand by.  Nagle rushed down from the wheelhouse.  A
few minutes later Skibinski climbed the ladder.  As he reached the top
rung, he pulled off his face mask and began sobbing, "He's dead!  He's
dead!"  Then, before anyone could assist him, he pitched forward and
fell face-first onto the Seekers wooden deck, a three-foot fall.
Chatterton, Nagle, and Lombardo rushed to the mumbling diver, believing
he might have broken his neck.  They moved Skibinski gingerly, trying
to remove his gear.  Skibinski could only say, "He's dead!  I couldn't
breathe!  My regulator!  He's dead!"  Chatterton removed the diver's
hood.  Skibinski was covered in vomit.

"Paul, listen to me," Chatterton said.  "Did you do your deco?"

"I don't know ..."  -*

"You must answer me," Chatterton said.  "Did you do your deco?"

"Steve's dead!"  Skibinski cried before vomiting again.

"DID YOU DO YOUR DECO?"

Skibinski managed to nod confirmation that he had decompressed.

Roberts surfaced next.

"Feldman's down there!  You gotta go get him!"  he yelled.

Chatterton did not move.  He studied Roberts's face.

"Come on, get going!"  Roberts yelled at Chatterton.  "Feldman is down
there!"

Chatterton noticed blood on Roberts's face.  His medic instincts took
over.  "Let me look in your mask," Chatterton ordered.  "You might have
emboli zed

Chatterton took the mask.  It was full of blood.  Roberts coughed up
more blood through his mouth and nose.  Someone yelled, "Get a
chopper!"  Chatterton retracted into a new level of calm.  He looked
deeply into Roberts's mouth and nose; the bleeding had stopped.

"I think he busted a blood vessel," Chatterton said.  "There's no

embolism.  Give him oxygen as a precaution.  We don't need a
chopper."

As he breathed oxygen and settled down, Roberts confirmed that Feldman
had been without a regulator for close to thirty minutes, that he had
tied Feldman to the line from his reel, and that the reel was now tied
to the anchor line at about 100 feet.  Chatterton gathered Nagle and
Danny Crowell.  "Before we do anything, we have to get everyone back on
the boat and make sure everyone's okay-no injuries, no nervous
breakdowns," Chatterton said.  "Then we have to go get the body."
"Who's going to go?"  Nagle asked.

"Danny and I will go," Chatterton said.  "We're crew.  We'll go get
him."

Crowell nodded.  He and Chatterton figured they would have to wait
another two hours before they had off-gassed enough nitrogen from their
first dives to return safely to the water.  Nagle returned to the
wheelhouse and locked the door.  He had his own decision to make.

Coast Guard rules required boat captains to radio immediately whenever
a diver went missing.  But nothing said that a captain had to drop
everything to radio news of a dead diver.  Ordinarily, Nagle or any
other captain would have called in Feldman's death straightaway; it was
the decent thing to do and would expedite the Coast Guard's mandatory
investigation.  Nagle just stared at his radios.  If he called the
Coast Guard now, hours before Chatterton and Crowell could even attempt
to recover Feldman's body, he would be broadcasting the wreck's
location to every boat and seaman in a thirty-mile radius, any of whom
could use a direction finder to zero in on and steal the wreck site.
Worse, he believed that Bielenda had moles in the Coast Guard; if he
revealed the location-now or ever-it would be just a matter of time
before Bielenda raided the submarine and stole the Seeker's glory.

Nagle made a plan.  He would radio the Coast Guard only when the Seeker
was ready to pull up anchor and head back to shore.  Even then, he
would give them just an approximate location of the accident.  "Why the
hell do they need to know exactly where this happened?"  he reasoned.
"They aren't coming out here one way or the

other for a dead guy."  He left the wheelhouse without touching the
radios.

Two hours after Skibinski surfaced, Chatterton and Crowell geared up
and went to get Feldman.  At around 100 feet they found Roberts's line
tied to the anchor line.  Feldman should be attached to the line at the
bottom of the ocean.  Chatterton descended to retrieve the body.  He
reached the bottom.  Connected to the line were Feldman's mask and
snorkel, but no body.

Chatterton knew what had happened: in the tunnel vision and slowed
motor skills of narcosis, Roberts had tied the line to Feldman's head
instead of to his harness or tanks.  As the current had tumble weeded
Feldman across the sand, the line had slipped over his head, caught on
his mask and snorkel, and come free.  Feldman was still somewhere on
the ocean bottom.  Chatterton and Crowell, however, were out of time
and could not continue to search for him.  They returned to the boat
and gathered the other divers.

"Listen," Chatterton said.  "We gotta go down and try to find this guy.
He was negatively buoyant, so we know he's not floating on the surface
somewhere.  He's in the sand and he's off the wreck.  I don't know that
we can find him.  But we gotta look."  The divers held their breath,
hoping Chatterton would not say what he said next.

"We gotta do sand sweeps."

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.  If the search is fruitless, the diver lets out more line,
backs up farther, and sweeps a bigger arc.  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.

Chatterton asked for volunteers.  It was no small request.  The day

was getting late and everyone's nerves were shot, a petri dish for
narcosis.  And no one could help Feldman, anyway.

Many divers still had two or three hours of off-gassing obligation and
could not get back into the water before dark.  Nagle was in no
physical condition to dive.  That left just four or five candidates.

Brennan shook his head.

"The guy's already dead," he told Chatterton.  "I'm not getting bent or
going lost to help a dead guy.  I already almost drowned from Skibinski
panicking, and I cut my deco short.  The current is whipping now.
There's nothing I can do for the guy.  I'm not risking my life."

Chatterton would not risk sending Roberts back into the water.
Skibinski was an emotional wreck.  John Hildemann and Mark McMahon
stepped forward.  They would do the sweeps.  Hildemann would go
first-he was the only diver who had not yet been in the water.  If
necessary, McMahon would follow.

At the bottom, Hildemann attached a strobe to the anchor line.
Visibility was perhaps thirty feet.  The current blasted past his face.
He paid out some line.  He walked his arc and scanned the ocean floor.
In every direction he was alone.  The bloody green of the water grew
more eerie with each pass.  He found broken pieces of wood but nothing
else.

McMahon was next.  He tied his penetration line to the top of the
wreck, then backed up slowly, allowing forty feet of line to un spool
from his reel, never taking his eyes off the wreck.  When the line went
taut, he began sweeping, hovering ten feet above the ocean bottom to
broaden his perspective.  Nothing.  He let out another twenty-five feet
and began drifting backward.  The wreck faded into wavy shadow, then
disappeared.  Now, wherever he looked, McMahon saw only dirty green
water, sideways white particulates, and his one-eighth-inch white line
stretching into the darkness.  But no body.  The jungle drums beat
louder.  He let out another twenty-five feet.  A crab popped out of the
sand and spoke to him.

"Keep coming, Mark," the crab said.  "Keep coming, man."  McMahon was
startled.  But he was also enchanted.  He stopped sweeping and looked
closer.  More crabs popped out of the sand.  They all waved their claws
to him.  Each of them spoke perfect English.

"Over here, Mark, over here," they said.  "Keep coming ..."

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."

On board, McMahon told the divers that he too had come up empty.  By
now, Feldman could have drifted five miles from the boat.  Dusk was
approaching.  It was a terrible thing to leave a diver behind, and it
would be crushing for his family.  But Chatterton and Nagle had reached
a limit.  "Someone is gonna get killed if we keep looking," Chatterton
said.  He and Nagle agreed to pull up anchor and head back to shore.

In the wheelhouse, Nagle radioed the Coast Guard and reported a dead
diver.  It was four P.M.-five hours since he had first heard that
Feldman had died.  When the Coast Guard asked why he had not called
sooner, Nagle told them he had been busy getting divers out of the
water and then organizing the underwater searches.  When they asked him
for the accident location, he gave them rough coordinates, within a few
square miles of the site; that would keep claim jumpers-and especially
Bielenda-away^ from what rightfully belonged to the Seeker.

The Coast Guard ordered Nagle to Manasquan, New Jersey, where it said
it would meet the Seeker at the pier.  The five-hour ride was
melancholy and quiet.  Some divers tried to console Skibinski, assuring
him that he had done everything possible for his friend.  Many
speculated as to what had caused the accident, the consensus being that
Feldman had succumbed to deep-water blackout, a not-uncommon condition
of sudden unconsciousness that afflicted divers for reasons science
still did not understand.

The Seeker arrived at the U.S. Coast Guard Station in Manasquan Inlet
at about ten P.M. Each man aboard the boat was taken inside and asked
to write an account of the incident, then was released.  Driving home
that night, Skibinski thought back to a conversation he'd had with
Feldman over dinner the night before.  They had been discussing the
trip-who was going, what they might find, the submarine's identity, and
especially how happy they were for the opportunity.  Out of nowhere,
Feldman had said, "If I ever die, I want to die diving because I love
it so much."  Now, nearing home,

Skibinski reached into his wallet for a phone number.  At an Exxon
station he called Feldman's close friend Buddy and told him the bad
news.

Most of the divers called wives and girlfriends from the dock and told
them about Feldman.  They did so to let the women know they were okay
and because they needed someone awake when they got home.

Brennan returned after midnight.  After his girlfriend went to sleep,
he called Richie Kohler.  This time, he played no Italian-accent
guessing games with his friend.

"Richie, man, it's Kevin.  Something terrible happened."

Brennan's voice sounded so flat Kohler barely recognized it.

"What time is it, Kevin?"

"You know Feldman?"

"No.  Who is he?"

"He's dead."

"Who's Feldman?"

"Paul's partner.  He's fucking dead.  Oh, man, Richie ..."

"Kevin, what happened?  Go slow and tell me what happened."

Brennan could choke out only the most basic details.

"I gotta go, Richie.  I'll call you tomorrow and tell you the whole
story."

Kohler hung up the phone.  He felt bad for the dead diver.  But he had
just one thought as he climbed into bed, and that thought hung over him
until morning: he had to replace Feldman on the next trip.

Brennan called back the next day and told Kohler the whole story.  At
the end, Kohler spoke frankly; the men were tight and always Brooklyn
direct with each other.

"Kevin, you gotta get me on the next trip."

"I know, Richie.  I'll talk to Bill today."

Brennan pitched Kohler that afternoon.  To Nagle, the idea seemed
perfect.  Kohler was smart, tough, and relentless, one of the best
wreck divers on the eastern seaboard.  He had steeped himself in World
War II history and knew German lore and artifacts.  He was at home in
crazy-deep water.  And he would not go and get him

self killed-the last thing Nagle needed after the Feldman accident.

Ordinarily, Kohler would have been included from the start of the
expedition.  But there were issues.  First, Chatterton disliked Kohler,
not just personally but for what he represented.  Kohler was a member
of the infamous Atlantic Wreck Divers, a hard-core and exclusionary
dive gang that wore matching skull-and-crossbones patches sewn onto
their denim jackets and raised hell on the boats they chartered.  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.

If Kohler's membership in Atlantic Wreck Divers was his only failing,
Chatterton could have forgiven that; he dove often with a few of the
gang's members and liked those men personally.  But Kohler had
committed a far graver sin, maybe the worst sin, and it was this black
mark that lingered with Chatterton.  Two years earlier, Kohler and
others had set out on a mission that would fuck the Seeker-Late in
1989, Chatterton had squeezed through a tiny opening that led to the
third-class dining room on the Andrea Doria.  Many divers had spent
years trying to access third class, but none had succeeded.  Inside,
Chatterton saw mountains of glistening white china, more than Seeker
divers could haul out in years.  Chatterton considered it a big
opportunity for Nagle: divers would kill for a place on Seeker charters
for access to these artifacts.  The problem was that few besides
Chatterton had the skill to shimmy through such a tight opening.  He
proposed a wild solution: he could use a Broco underwater torch on the
next trip and burn away one of the steel bars blocking the opening.
After that, anyone could swim in.  Nagle told him, "You are one amazing
son of a bitch."

On a special Seeker run to the Doria, Chatterton assembled the torch
and rigged its onboard oxygen cylinder and the hoses that delivered its
fuel.  Underwater, he changed into a diving mask to which

he had taped a welding shield and fired up the Broco.  The torch spit
blinding red and white sparks as its ten-thousand-degree Fahrenheit rod
boiled the ocean around it.  That day, Seeker divers hauled perhaps a
hundred bowls and dishes from the Doria, the first artifacts ever to
come out of third class.  One of the divers took video to commemorate
the historic occasion.  At the trip's end, Nagle gathered the divers.

"It's too late in the season to come back," he said.  "But first thing
next year, we come back and kick ass in third class."

A short time later, someone from the Seeker turned traitor.  A copy of
the videotape was leaked.  Kohler and some other members of the
Atlantic Wreck Divers watched the tape, astounded as Chatterton used
the Broco to burn his way in-impossible!  As the bar fell away and the
hole opened up, the video showed a white mountain of dishes inside that
looked piled by Walt Disney himself.  More than one man muttered, "Holy
shit."

The video lasted just a few minutes.  Kohler had never seen a bounty
like this.  Every cell in his body lusted for the easy ransom
glistening in the room that Chatterton had opened.  But there was bad
news: word had it that Chatterton and Nagle were planning to go back to
the Doria early the next season, long before most boats would even
consider tackling that wreck.  Their mission: to haul every last
artifact from the area and leave nothing for Bielenda or the Wahoo.

Often, a ribbon of salvation runs through the lives of deep shipwreck
divers.  This time, that ribbon weighed two hundred and fifteen pounds.
Bielenda had planned his own trip to the Doria, a charter scheduled
just two days before the Seeker's.  Kohler and the others could be
there just in time to waltz into Chatterton's area and take away as
much as they could carry, leaving the site damn near empty by the time
the Seeker got there.  Knowing the bad blood between Bielenda and
Nagle, Kohler believed this to be a heaven-sent opportunity for
Bielenda.  But the idea of beating Nagle to the Doria grinded against
Kohler's ethic: you don't jump another guy's claim.  Still, the video
was irresistible, the china so magnificent and endless.  Kohler had met
Chatterton just once, briefly, so he was not concerned about the skinny
guy with the blowtorch.  He liked and respected Nagle, and had had only
positive experiences aboard the Seeker.  He also believed Bielenda a
blowhard and a follower, not a doer.  He snickered at the name "King of
the Deep."  But the china was so beautiful and stacked like snowy
mountains, and his fellow AWD guys were going and ...

"Sign me up," he told Bielenda.  Kohler could not remember ever seeing
Bielenda so ravenous to lead a charter.

Bielenda's trip was scheduled for June 23.  Kohler kept his mouth shut
about the charter.  But someone's conscience had kicked in.  The plan
was leaked to Nagle, including the date of the Wahoo trip.  Nagle
called Chatterton, drunk and furious.

"Those motherfuckers!"  he screamed into the telephone.  "We gotta do
something!"

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.  They would fill their bags with
china.  Then Chatterton and Plokhoy would install the grate.  When the
Wahoo divers arrived they would find the hole closed.

The plan sounded perfect to Nagle.  But Chatterton never stopped at
phase one of any plan.  He formulated additional criteria:

He and Plokhoy would design a grate that they could open and close;
simply welding a grate in place would lock out everyone, including
Seeker divers.

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.

The grate must still allow a diver to pass through the tiny opening
Chatterton had originally wiggled into so that anyone wanting to work
to get in, as Chatterton had, retained that opportunity.

Chatterton and Plokhoy went to work on the design in a local dive
shop's classroom.  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.  Finally, they squirted grease into the grate's recessed bolt
assembly to disguise the custom nature of the lock-the divers on
Bielenda's boat would be like monkeys trying to open the grate with
standard wrenches.

The Seeker set out for the Doria forty-eight hours before Bielenda's
scheduled trip.  For two days, the divers were Christmas elves,
stuffing their bags with third-class china until they could not carry
any more.  On the afternoon of the second day, Chatterton and Plokhoy
suited up to install the grate.  They told Nagle that they planned to
leave a sign for Bielenda and the Wahoo divers, something clever and
subtle that would make their point.  Nagle's face turned red.

"You should write, FUCK YOU, BIELENDA, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!"  "I don't
know if that's exactly our point," Chatterton said.  "Anyway, we've
already prepared a message."

The installation of the grate was flawless.  It shook but did not give.
It looked easy but was bulletproof.  Chatterton reached into his bag
for the slate and tie-wrapped it to the grate.  In block letters he had
written:

CLOSED FOR INVENTORY PLEASE USE ALTERNATE ENTRANCE

THANK YOU CREW AND PATRONS OF SEEKER

Bielenda's boat set out that evening for the Doria.  As the Wahoo
settled over the great wreck, two crew members splashed to set the hook
as close to the third-class hole as possible.  Bielenda then had divers
draw straws for the chance to enter the hole first.  Kohler and fellow
Atlantic Wreck Diver Pete Guglieri won.  They made a simple plan: fill
as many bags as humanly possible.  As Kohler splashed, he could not
remember ever having been more excited.

The divers hit the wreck a minute later and came face-to-face with
Chatterton's sign.  For a time they simply hung there flabbergasted.
Then they got mad.  Guglieri shook the grate.  Kohler pounded it with
his sledgehammer.  They inspected the grate from every angle, trying to
figure a way to beat the lock.  Both men worked in construction and
understood how things came apart.  They tried every trick they knew.
Nothing worked.  Kohler nearly lost consciousness from anger.  Once his
air supply was depleted, he could do nothing more than cut off the sign
Chatterton had left.

When the divers returned to the Wahoo, Bielenda and the others crowded
around for the first report.

"How'd we do?"  Bielenda asked.

The divers described the grate.

"Those cocksuckers!"  Bielenda screamed.

Furious, Bielenda paced and stomped and screamed.  Someone suggested
chaining the Wahoo to the grate and yanking it off.  Bielenda rejected
the idea, reminding them that the Wahoo was just a forty-nine-ton
boat.

As Kohler and Guglieri undressed, Guglieri began to laugh.

"What is so fucking funny?"  Kohler asked.

"Give them credit," Guglieri said.  "They found it first.  And that
grate is some piece of work.  More power to them."

For a moment Kohler glared at his partner.  Then his eyes turned up at
the corners.  A second later he was laughing full out with his
friend.

"You're right," Kohler said.  "We tried to fuck them and they fucked us
first."

Now, more than a year later, Nagle could forgive Kohler.  Diving was a
carnivorous business; these things happened every so often and had to
be allowed to blow over.  Kohler, in the interim, had had a nasty
falling-out with Bielenda and had sworn off the King of the Deep
forever.  To Nagle, Kohler seemed the only natural choice as Feldman's
replacement.

Chatterton was another matter.  A man of honor and principle, he would
feel differently about sharing such an important dive with a person who
had once set out to screw him.  Nagle balanced the concerns in his
mind.  He respected Chatterton more than anyone.  But

this dive was too big; it was history.  He needed the best divers in
his arsenal.  He told Brennan to give Kohler the green light.

Word of Feldman's death ricocheted through the wreck-diving community.
Divers everywhere now knew that the Seeker had discovered a submarine.
As the workweek began, Nagle's phone rang off the hook with requests
from divers, including many who had passed on the discovery trip, to
join the team.  He invited two of these divers along: Brad Sheard, an
aerospace engineer and underwater photographer, and Steve McDougal, a
state trooper.  They would replace Lloyd Garrick, who took some time
off from diving shortly after the incident, and Dick Shoe, who remained
willing to dive the Doria and other deadly wrecks but vowed never to
return to something so dangerous as this submarine.

Nagle planned a return trip to the wreck site for September 29, just
eight days after the Feldman incident.  Kohler arrived at the dock at
around ten P.M. dressed in full gang colors-denim jacket,
skull-and-crossbones patch, and "Atlantic Wreck Divers" logo.
Chatterton was already aboard and tying down his gear.  "Ay!  A little
help ovah hee-ah?"  Kohler asked into the air with an accent atomized
from the stoops of Brooklyn.  "How's the wauta look?  Any of yooz seen
Kevin?"

Chatterton, already aboard and joking with another diver, went silent.
Without looking up, he knew that this was the sound of East Coast gang
diving, the noise of the artifact pirate, the voice of the guy who had
tried to screw him on the Doria.  He turned away from his conversation
and took a step toward the dock where Kohler stood.  A half dozen
conversations around the boat faded to hush.  Nagle, who lived for a
good blood feud, pressed his face against the glass of the wheelhouse
above.  Kohler stepped forward so that the toes of his tennis shoes
hung over the water.  Each man shot his convictions into the other's
stare.  Kohler's shoulders twitched, just enough to give life to the
"Atlantic Wreck Divers" patch spread winglike across his back.
Chatterton hated the jacket and took another step forward.  Ordinarily,
either of them might have pressed the plunger then.  Tonight, however,
neither moved farther.  Feldman

was just eight days dead and still missing.  Brennan stepped forward
and said, "Here, Richie, hand me your shit."  With that, Chatterton
returned to packing his gear and Kohler stepped onto the Seeker for his
first trip to the mystery U-boat.

The Seeker left Brielle around midnight.  Kohler and Brennan remained
on deck, watching the shoreline disappear and debating the reck. Kohler
believed, as he had on first hearing of the discovery, that the divers
had found the Spikefish, the World War II American submarine sunk in
the 1960s for target practice.  Brennan insisted it was a German U-boat
and told Kohler, "When you get down there you'll know. You'll hear the
music."

Chatterton splashed first and tied in the grapple.  His plan was
trademark: shoot video, forgo artifacts, return with knowledge.  He
often used video cameras, which picked up underwater nuances that were
beyond the human eye, then watched the tapes topside, learning wreck
topographies and planning his second dive.  At home, he watched the
tapes dozens of times more.

Chatterton swam into the gaping hole in the submarine's side and turned
his camera in all directions, careful to record the way in which the
mechanical chaos splaying from the boat's wounds might catch and trap a
diver.  He then backed out and swam over the wreck, first toward the
forward torpedo-loading hatch, then to the stern area, where, except
for a portion of one blade, the propeller lay buried in the sand.  When
his time ran out, he returned to the anchor line and began his ascent.
Once again, he would finish a dive without recovering an artifact.

Kohler and Brennan followed.  Immediately, Kohler recognized the
narrowness of the wreck for a submarine.  The divers swam aft and above
the ship until reaching an open hatch.  The sight stopped Kohler in his
tracks-submarine hatches were supposed to be closed.  He shined his
light inside.  A ladder led downward into darkness.

"Someone had to have opened that hatch," Kohler thought.  He envisioned
water flooding in and men screaming and scrambling up the ladder and
opening that hatch to escape.

Kohler pulled his head out of the hatch and he and Brennan began their
ascent to the surface.  Kohler had hoped to find some artifact,
anything, written in English to prove that the submarine was the
Spikefish, but he'd found nothing.  When he climbed aboard the Seeker,
he undressed and sat down for lunch in the salon.  Nearby, Chatterton
studied his videotape on the room's tiny television.  Other divers
discussed their findings.  No one, it turned out, had recovered
anything meaningful.

Around noon, Chatterton dressed for his second dive.  Brennan, slightly
bent and achy in his joints from his dive, packed his gear away and
called it a day.  Kohler geared up by himself and would make his second
dive alone.  He and Chatterton never considered diving together, but
the two of them splashed within minutes of each other.

This time Chatterton intended to penetrate the submarine.  He swam
toward the fallen conning tower, which lay beside the submarine like a
mobster gunned down beside his car.  A single pipe connected the fallen
tower to the body of the submarine.  From diagrams he had seen,
Chatterton recognized the pipe as one of the ship's two periscopes.  He
drifted inside the conning tower, where the periscope's other end
remained in its protective metal housing, a kind of armor shaped like a
Spartan's helmet with a section cut out for the lens.  Chatterton
recalled having seen a builder's plaque attached to the periscope
housing in photographs of the U-505.  He doubled back to the control
room and searched for the plaque inside this cramped conning tower but
found nothing-whatever identification might have existed here had been
eaten away by nature or disintegrated through violence.  At the top of
the conning tower he saw the hatch that allowed crewmen to enter and
exit.  The hatch was open.

Chatterton reversed field and exited the conning tower.  He now faced
the submarine's gaping hole.  He swam inside and then through a small
circular hatch, the one through which crewmen ducked when traveling
between the control room and the officers' quarters or the sound and
radio rooms.  The bulkhead that connected the hatch to the submarine's
body was blown out on the port side, a condition Chatterton knew must
have resulted from a devastating force.  He finger-walked forward,
meticulously avoiding the forest of bent pipes, jagged metal, and
traumatized electrical cables

that blurted from walls and ceiling.  The water inside the submarine
was still, the particulates scarce and hovering.  The submarine's ribs,
intact and visible, arched across the curved ceiling.  Chatterton was
likely now in the sound and radio rooms and across from the commander's
quarters.  He continued forward, jutting left through one rectangular
doorway and right through another, until he came to an area filled with
elbow-shaped pipes and cracked metal flooring.  Something tugged at his
instincts.  He studied his Chicago memories, the movies he had made of
U-505 collapsing around him.  There might be a cabinet here, he
thought, though it likely would not look like a cabinet anymore.  He
swam left and shined his light.  Dark fish with white whiskers scurried
away.  He stopped moving and allowed his eyes to adjust.  A cabinet
shape appeared before him as if from a vapor.  He still did not move.
The rims of bowls and plates seemed to protrude from the cabinet.  He
swam forward and reached for the china.  Two bowls came loose.  He
brought them to his face.  The fronts were white with green rims.  On
the backs, engraved in black, was the year 1942.  Above that marking
were the eagle and the swastika, the symbol of Hitler's Third Reich.

At the same time, Kohler was completing his^ second dive.  He had swum
to the open hatch inside the U-boat's hole, but by this time Chatterton
had disturbed the visibility enough so that Kohler did not dare enter.
Instead, he ventured inside the fallen conning tower and found a piece
of speaker tube, the kind a crewman would talk into, but it revealed no
writing.  He stuffed it in his goody bag and began his ascent to the
surface.

Chatterton checked his watch and saw that it was time to go.  Foot by
foot he retraced his path, until he emerged from the submarine and
found the anchor line.  He was exuberant as he ascended-his planning
and homework had paid off.  He would give Nagle one of these bowls. The
look on the captain's face would be priceless.

For nearly an hour, both Chatterton and Kohler ascended and
decompressed, each unaware that the other was nearby.  At 30 feet,
Chatterton caught up to Kohler and settled just below him.  Kohler

angled his head sideways to steal a glimpse at Chatterton's bag. Kohler
could not contain himself-he lived for artifacts and was powerless at
the sight of a bulging goody bag.  He released the anchor line and
drifted down to Chatterton.  The divers were now eye to eye. The
unmistakable bone white of china seemed to light the ocean around
Chatterton.  Kohler's face flushed and his heart pounded.  There was
history in Chatterton's bag; he could smell it.  He reached for the
bag.

Chatterton snatched the bag away and turned his shoulder to block
Kohler.  The divers' bodies tensed.  Their eyes locked.  No one moved
for what seemed like minutes.  The men did not like each other.  They
did not like what the other represented.  And you don't touch a guy's
shit.  But as Chatterton searched Kohler's eyes he could not find
anything sinister in them; the man was just flat-out excited to see the
china.  Chatterton opened his shoulder, slowly at first, and pushed the
bag forward.  Through the mesh Kohler could see the eagle and swastika
and he erupted, screaming through his regulator, "Holy shit!  You did
it!  I can't believe this!  You did it!"  For a minute he danced like a
child as he held the bag, twirling and kicking and punching Chatterton
in the arm, looking away and then back again to make sure he was seeing
what he thought he was seeing.  Now there was no doubt.  The divers had
discovered a German U-boat.

Chatterton did his best to block Kohler's celebration punches as the
two ascended to their next stop.  On board the Seeker, Nagle held the
bowls and could only repeat, "Fuckin'-A ... fuckin'-A ..."  The other
divers slapped Chatterton's back and snapped photos of him holding the
bowls.

As the Seeker steamed home and many of the divers retired to the salon
to sleep, Chatterton and Kohler found themselves sitting together atop
a cooler.  The trip had overwhelmed Kohler; it had brought together, in
a single day, his passions for naval history, submarines, exploration,
and artifacts.  It had made him feel a part of history.  For a while,
he and Chatterton discussed the U-boat's construction, its damage,
those open hatches.  Neither of them mentioned Atlantic Wreck Divers or
Bielenda or the past.

"You know, this was the most exciting dive of my life," Kohler told

Chatterton.  "The whole thing was once in a lifetime.  But the part I
liked best was the time we spent in the water just looking at those
dishes.  For a while, you and I were the only two people in the world
who knew this was a U-boat.  The only two in the world."

Chatterton nodded.  He understood what Kohler meant He could tell that
Kohler was not talking about diving now, he was talking about life, and
he thought it would not be a bad thing to get to know this man
better.

CHAPTER SIX

RICHIE KOHLER

If EVER A PERSON had been born to dive a virgin U-boat, that person was
Richie Kohler.

In 1968, Richard and Frances Kohler moved with their three young
children into a house in Marine Park, a close-knit Italian and Jewish
neighborhood in Brooklyn where kids ran chores for elderly widows and
immigrants grew figs in their narrow backyards.  Richard, a
twenty-eight-year-old owner of a glass business, was of German descent
and proud of it.  Frances, twenty-seven, had her roots in Sicily and
was equally proud of her heritage.  Each aimed to instill their sense
of culture in the children, especially in six-year-old Richie, who was
now old enough to appreciate such flavors.  As the Kohlers raised
Richie, however, they noticed that something unusual was going on with
their boy.  He read voraciously, but not the big-print kiddie stuff
typical of first graders.  Instead he studied National Geographic, war
histories, and anything concerning outer space.  When nothing remained
in the house to read, he started over and read everything again.  His
mother asked if he might not rather be outside playing with other kids
and rolling around and getting dirty.  He asked his mother to subscribe
to Popular Mechanics.  Frances did not know whether to celebrate or
call a doctor.  She had never met a person-child or adult-so relentless
in his pursuit of answers.

Frances bought her son more books, and Richie kept reading- military
biographies, battle narratives, weapons manuals, and anything that
celebrated bravery.  Before long, Frances had to force Richie
outside.

When Richie discovered the Apollo program, the idea of penetrating an
alien environment and then mastering it seemed too wonderful to
believe.  He read about Neil Armstrong and that settled it-he would be
an astronaut.  He drank Tang for energy, dressed his G.I. Joes in
homemade tinfoil "space suits," and pleaded with his mother to buy
Swanson TV dinners-the closest facsimile to space food available in
Brooklyn.

All the while, his father worked grueling hours building his glass
business.  In between, he committed himself to the proper raising of
his children.  He appreciated Richie's love of reading, but he also
wanted the boy to toughen up, to learn the kinds of lessons no one
published in books.  He taught his son to do physical things-at home,
at his shop, on his boat-and he assigned him important
responsibilities.  Richie could cut glass at seven, and had mastered
the circular saw by eight.  When Richie faltered, Kohler would rail,
"Are you stupid?"  or "Don't be so dumb!"  and Richie's chin would drop
to his chest-he worshiped his father, and it crushed him to disappoint
the strongest man in the world.  Richie's mother recoiled from the
words.  "How could you say that?"  she'd ask.  "You know how your own
father hurt you with those words.  How could you do the same to your
son?"  Richard Kohler could not answer her.

Soon Richie wanted to please his father even more than he wanted to be
an astronaut.  When his dad asked, "You play with G.I. Joes?  With
dolls?"  Richie switched to building models of warships and fighter
planes.  When his father took him boating and gave him important jobs,
he trembled at the idea of tying the wrong knot or steering too close
to an obstruction-the idea of being called stupid virtually caused the
rope to fall from his hands.  Yet he was tying and steering by himself
on the open ocean with his father-what seven-year-old kid in his
neighborhood did that?  Before long, Richie could do things teenagers
could not, all because his father believed he could and made certain he
could.

Even as Richie continued to gobble history, another kind of education
was taking hold in him.  Each of his parents leaned harder into
teaching him to be proud of his heritage.  The smell of Frances's
Sicilian cooking, her family's instinct to hug and pinch cheeks and
leave lipstick marks, the forgoing of meat on Fridays, the embrace of
open emotion, the sounds of neighbors screaming to kids in Sicilian
dialects-these were the marks of Richie's Italian roots.  He looked the
part, too.  His thick black hair, sculpted to the side Donny Osmond
style, was shag carpeting against a brush's drag.  His skin was the
olive color at the bottom of his mother's imported bottles of
extra-virgin oil, his eyes the brown of playground bark.  His eyebrows
drooped at the ends like the arms of a football player being helped
from the field, but they were storytelling eyebrows, the kind that cock
and dip into action when the passionate describe their lives.  When he
was young, Richie's eyebrows were always in motion, even when he
read.

Richie's father countered that as Germans, he and Richie were part of a
hardworking and honest people who accepted neither handouts nor grief.
His overarching philosophy was "If you want more, you have to be more,"
and he imparted this to Richie relentlessly.  He warned Richie to be
proud of his heritage and never to allow anyone in this "Guinea"
neighborhood-or the world for that matter-to tell him he was less for
being German.  Richie had already developed a foundational German pride
from reading books and watching history programs, and he noticed from
these sources that whatever people thought of Germans, they always
respected their instinct for excellence.

Most indelible, perhaps, were his father's memories of Mr.  Segal, a
neighbor he had idolized as a boy.  Segal, a German immigrant, had been
the strong man in a German circus and had traveled the land several
times before fleeing as Hitler rose to power.  Segal had told Richard
Kohler of the country he had loved, a land of craftsmen who built
beautiful things, of leading scientists and artists, of storybook
villages with ancient traditions, of quiet pride and a deep work ethic.
Before Mr.  Segal, Kohler never thought to consider his heritage. After
Mr.  Segal, Kohler was German.  Sometimes Richie's father seemed to
lose himself in these memories of Mr.  Segal, as if he were a kid
himself again, and young Richie could hear then that his

father considered Mr.  Segal his hero, and this idea overwhelmed the
boy, the idea of a man so strong as to be a hero to his hero.

Richie began to focus his reading on German history, especially World
War II.  On television he noticed that Germans were often portrayed as
sneaky rats, and he wondered why people thought Germans were so bad
when it was this one monster, Hitler, who had hurt the country.  He
read about Germany before the war and how Hitler had come to power.
Whenever school required a research project or book report, he wrote
about the German side.  The name Kohler, he told people in his
neighborhood, came from the German word for "coal miner."

As Richie gulped more history, he noticed that he thought differently
about things than his peers did.  Many of them liked to read about war
and battles, but only Richie seemed interested in the lives of the
soldiers.  He wondered about weird things his friends never
considered-about the letters soldiers wrote when pinned down in a
bunker, about why privates always seemed to long for the little stuff
at home the most, about the childhood of a fighter pilot, about how a
family felt when they got word that their son had been killed.  When he
saw photographs in books of soldiers lying dead on the battlefield, he
hoped that the book was not available in those soldiers' hometowns

Though Richie's father worked grueling hours, he made certain to spend
time with his children on weekends.  He was not, however, the type of
father to toss a baseball or attend school plays.  If Richie wanted to
be with his dad-and he did very much-he would have to do so on his
dad's terms, which always meant on the boat.

Often he quivered while his father watched him tie the bowline or wax
the chrome handrails because he knew that if he faltered his father
might call him names or say, "Don't be so useless!"  When he did things
right, however, he was elated.  His father allowed him great
responsibility aboard the boat, and soon Richie began to absorb his
father's "no matter what"-the idea that if he set his mind to it, there
was nothing he could not do.

Offshore, the world expanded before the seven-year-old's already wide
eyes.  Richie's father loved to fish and, like all fishermen, owned a
book of numbers, a passport to secret places.  Often they

fished the shipwrecks, and while they watched their poles Kohler told
his son that row after row of wrecks lay beneath them courtesy of the
German U-boats, fantastic hunting machines that had thrived in the most
hostile environments on earth.  To Richie, who had dreamed of
conquering the alien environment of outer space, the idea of such a
machine operating decades ago, in his own neighborhood, seemed more
amazing than the science fiction he watched on TV.  When their boating
trips took them through the Rockaway Inlet, Richie asked about the
circular stone pillar built into the water, equidistant from Brooklyn
and Breezy Point; it looked like a castle.  His father explained that
the Army Corps of Engineers had used the structure to string steel nets
underwater to block the U-boats from entering Jamaica Bay.  "Can you
believe that, Richie?"  his father asked.  "The Germans came right
here.  Look, you can see the Verrazano Bridge.  That's how close the
U-boats came."  Richie reveled in the information, but did not breathe
a word of it to friends.  To him, knowledge of U-boats on America's
front porch was a secret only fishermen like him and his father should
share.

After his father told him about those steel nets, Richie went to the
store and bought a U-boat model, and he painted that model until it
looked as if it had been caught up in those steel nets itself.  When he
studied his father's navigational charts he was amazed to see a sunken
U-boat, U-853, off Block Island in Rhode Island listed along with a
thrilling red-letter entreaty: WARNING-UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE.  A quarter
century since the U-boats had sailed and there was still something
alive about them.

On a sunny and warm day when Richie was eight, his father took him on a
waterskiing trip to Dead Horse Bay in the Mill Basin waters off
Brooklyn, a small area around which boats pulled water-skiers.  During
one of Richie's runs, the line went slack and he fell into the
water-his father had cut the engines.  Kohler made a U-turn, yelling to
Richie, "Get in the boat!  Get in the boat!"  and then plucked his son
out of the water.  He then began making slow circles around an object.
Kohler told Richie, "Get inside the cuddy and don't look."  Richie's
life was devoted to looking.  He went into the cabin only halfway and
kept watching, following the object his father circled until he could
tell that it was a body, a woman-he knew it was a woman because he
could see her bikini bottom.  His

father called the Coast Guard and continued circling.  Richie looked
closer.  The woman was facedown, her long hair floating on the water,
her legs spread, her buttocks peeking out from beneath her bathing
suit, several symmetrical white flesh wounds chopped across her back
and thighs.  Her body bobbed in the wake of his father's boat. Richie's
heart pounded, but he could not stop looking.  He did not cry. He did
not hide.  He wondered how a person could be left in the ocean without
anyone knowing she was there.

As the boating season drew to a close, Richie's father decided to learn
scuba.  At home, Kohler allowed Richie to assemble and disassemble his
tank and regulator-he believed in making his three children feel
comfortable with mechanical equipment, to make them unafraid to touch
things.  He threw the equipment to the bottom of the family's
above-ground backyard pool, then told Richie to swim down, assemble it,
and begin breathing.  The idea that Richie was able to conquer this
underwater world put him on par with the divers he watched in 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea.

All the while, Richie continued to read.  Had an observer known only
his academic side, he might have pegged the kid for an egghead.  Richie
joined no sports teams and did not play outside with the regularity of
most neighborhood boys.  He spent much of his free time reading or
building World War II models, which he customized with increasing
detail.  Yet Richie was no softie.  When Richie's father heard that a
towering, Afro-headed bully named Vin-me had beaten Richie up after
school, he walked the block with Richie until he found the culprit and
forced his son to pummel the boy.  Neighborhood kids saw Richie
differently after that fight.  Now word had it that if you messed with
Richie Kohler he could go wild.  No one bothered him much after that.

The summer when Richie was nine, he, his father, and a dock mechanic
took the family's thirty-five-foot Viking Sport Fisherman, the Lisa
Frances, for a day of party boating.  By now, Richie was allowed to
navigate, swim in the ocean, even mix pitchers of vodka gimlets for the
adults; he was an important part of the crew.  Kohler gave Richie the
helm and allowed the boy to steer out of the inlet and into the
Atlantic.  Just ten minutes from the dock, Richie cut the wheel hard,
shaking his father to attention.

"What are you doing?"  his father called out.

"There's a tire ahead and I didn't want to hit it," Richie replied.
Kohler leaned over and looked into the water.  "That's not a tire," he
said.

Richie squinted for a better look.  As the boat drifted forward, he
could see that the shape he believed to be a tire was in fact a man's
body.  The person was facedown, arms straight out to his sides, legs
dangling in the water, a black windbreaker blown over his head like a
shroud.  As the boat passed, the water's wake shook the man's head
back, and Richie could see his face.  His eyes were closed and he was
clean shaven.  His hair was in his eyes and he wore a light-colored
turtleneck beneath the windbreaker.  The man's skin was white.  He was
dead.

Richie's father took the wheel and swung the boat around.  "Get in the
cabin and don't look!"  he ordered.  Richie left the wheelhouse but
kept looking.  His father and the other man took a ten-foot gaff and
fished the body toward the boat.  The water was rough and kept tossing
the corpse up and down, but the man's arms never changed shape; they
stayed in the crucifix position, away from his sides.  Kohler called
the Coast Guard.

"Bring the body on board," ordered the dispatcher.  "Absolutely not,"
Kohler responded.

Kohler knew that by taking a body on his boat, he would be involved in
a prolonged investigation, and he had no time for that.  Instead, he
chose to stay with the body and wait for the Coast Guard.  While the
authorities sped to the scene, Kohler and his friend indulged in
gallows humor: "Check him for a wallet!"  "Does he have any diamond
rings?"

When the Coast Guard boat arrived, it radioed to Kohler.  "Pull the
body onto your swim platform and follow us in."  "No way," Kohler
replied.  "I'm going to let the body go unless you come and take it."

That idea terrified Richie more than the sight of the body.  He could
not endure the prospect of a dead man going adrift at sea and lost
forever.  He knew his father was serious.  He prayed that the Coast
Guard would take the body.

The Coast Guard boat maneuvered closer in the rough water.  Richie
continued to stare at the dead man's face and those arms

spread at his sides.  As the Coast Guard boat passed, Kohler handed off
the gaff to the guardsman, who vomited at the sight.  The Coast Guard
boat ordered Kohler to follow it back to shore.  When everyone arrived
at the Coast Guard station, the body was moved to a gurney.  Water
dripped from the dead man's mouth.  A boy about Richie's age ran to the
gurney and cried, "My dad!  My dad!"  Richie trembled, using all his
powers of toughness to keep from sobbing.  A few minutes later, someone
told the Kohlers that the victim had been caught in a storm in a
sailboat and had been knocked overboard and drowned.  The man, they
said, was a minister.

All the way home, Richie thought about what would have happened if he
and his father hadn't found the minister.  It had been a year since he
had seen the dead woman in the water, but Richie had never stopped
wondering how people could be left in the water when they had loved
ones at home who needed to know where they were.

When Richie was eleven, his father finally took him diving.  The men
went to the dock where Kohler kept his boat.  Richie checked his
gauges, spit in his mask to keep it from fogging underwater, and patted
his side to make sure his knife was still in place.  When everything
felt right, he rolled backward into the water as he had seen actors do
on the TV series Sea Hunt.  The New York water was dotted with foam
cups and cigarettes, its surface splotched with oil and a broken
umbrella, but 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.

By the time Richie turned twelve his parents had separated and his
father had begun dating another woman.  One night in February 1975,
Frances tiptoed into Richie's bedroom, where the boy lay asleep.  She
woke him and handed him suitcases and told him to pack his belongings
and to help his brother do the same.

"Where are we going?"  Richie asked his mother, rubbing his eyes.

"We're going to Florida," Frances said.  She was surprised at her
answer.  She had never thought about Florida before this moment.

At two A.M."  Frances put the three children into her black Buick
Riviera and headed south on the New Jersey Turnpike.  At a gas station,
she bought maps and put Richie in charge of navigation.  When daylight
came, she pulled over at a rest stop and napped with the children. Then
she continued the drive until the family arrived at her mother's house
in New Port Richey, Florida.  She hadn't told her mother she was
coming.  Rosalie Ruoti kissed her daughter and squeezed her
grandchildren.  Frances knew then that she was never going back to New
York.

A few weeks after leaving New York, Richie celebrated his thirteenth
birthday at his grandmother's home in Florida.  Frances soon bought her
own house nearby.  By phone, Richie told his father, "I love you and
you're not here for me," and Kohler could only say, "You know, buddy, I
can't do anything.  Your mother and I don't get along."  After a few of
these calls, Richie knew that he would do the rest of his growing up in
Florida.

At fourteen, Richie enrolled in Hudson Senior High School, near his
home.  One day while outside for gym, a hulking muscle man of a
classmate began pushing around a tall, skinny, blond kid Richie
recognized from his algebra class.  Richie walked over and advised the
big guy to stop the bullying.  The bully said, "Mind your fucking
business or I'll ..."  Richie reached his right fist back to
Thirty-third Street and put it across the kid's chin.  The bully
collapsed to the concrete, where he began whimpering and talking
gibberish.  Richie's father was right: always swing while the other guy
is telling you how he's going to kick your ass.

The skinny kid thanked Richie and introduced himself as Don Davidson.
He invited Richie to his house after school.  Don's bedroom was
revelation.  Hanging from the ceiling were a half dozen models of World
War II fighter aircraft, each detailed so finely they could have been
mistaken in close-up photographs for the real thing.  Richie lay on his
back and took in the scene above him, and

soon he was under bleeding Filipino skies in 1944 at the Battle of
Leyte Gulf, machine guns shredding enemy wings and pilots bailing out
of burning cockpits.  Don was cool about Richie lying on the floor
because he did the same thing all the time.  On Don's bookshelves were
at least two dozen books on the Luftwaffe, Hitler's air force.  "I'm
German," Don told Richie.  "I'm really into the technology of World War
II-especially German engineering and their superior weapons."  Richie
told Don about the Kriegsmarine-the German navy-and about how U-boats
had come to New York's doorstep, just a mile or two from his own front
door.  Richie told Don he was German, too.  The boys were best friends
already.

After Richie and Don turned fifteen, they signed up for scuba classes
and earned their junior certification.  They dove constantly, spearing
fish and even tangling with sharks.  Richie felt every bit the
astronaut underwater, free to explore worlds off-limits to the kids who
sat, bored, next to him in biology class or study hall.  He reveled in
the finely tooled equipment that acted at once as shield and as portal
to the sea.  He thrived on the feeling of independence that came with
spearfishing; hunters Jike Don and himself spent as much as an hour
alone in a boundary less world without fathers, relying only on
themselves.

Richie's high school junior year found him drifting to the rowdy crowd.
The time he had devoted to bookish study for so many years increasingly
gave way to chugging Miller High Lifes on the beach, stashing weed in
plastic thirty-five-millimeter film containers, and customizing his
black 1974 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.  He wore the uniform of the
1970s burnout: hair to his shoulders, light mustache, cutoff shorts,
black rock-concert T-shirt silk-screened with glitter. In the Florida
sun, his already olive skin darkened to toast.  His jawline continued
to square.  Girls wanted to touch him.  His eyebrows kept talking and
talking.

In the classroom, Richie pulled As and B's, but teachers inscribed his
report cards with caveats like "Doesn't apply himself and "Does just
what he needs to do."  The street toughness stitched into him by his
father showed itself eagerly.  Once, when his fourteen-year-old
brother, Frank, confessed to being terrorized by an adult bully,
sixteen-year-old Richie pummeled the grown man until

he cried.  On another occasion, Richie and four junior-varsity football
teammates decided to pull a prank on some seniors by lighting their gym
clothes on fire through the metal grates in their lockers.  The school
pressed charges.  In court, the judge told the boys that if they stayed
out of trouble, the record would be expunged.  After that, Richie kept
clean.

As the year wore on, Richie began to think about his future.  He wanted
no more of school-for all the pleasure he took in learning, he needed
to be in the world doing, not behind more desks listening.  An idea
took shape in his mind.  He could join the navy.  In that way, he could
live on the water, travel the globe, and work with the most spectacular
fighting machines in the world.  Maybe-and this is when his heart
really started fluttering-he could work aboard an attack submarine. Not
a lumbering nuclear missile sub but a sleek, fast, hunter-killer
submarine.

Late in Richie's junior year, a U.S. Navy recruiter visited his high
school as part of Career Day.  Richie asked a lot of questions.  The
man told him there were officer-training programs available to the
highest scorers on the Armed Services Aptitude Test.  Those programs
guaranteed training in a recruit's area of choice-including submarines.
Richie signed up for the test and took it cold.  He scored at the
ninety-eighth percentile.  The United States Navy said they would love
to have him.  He asked again about submarines.

The recruiter assured Richie that if he gave the navy a six-year
commitment, the navy would guarantee him service aboard a submarine. He
presented a contract that memorialized the obligation.  Richie and his
mother signed the papers.  It had been years since his astronaut dreams
had fizzled.  Now, though it sounded strange, he told himself, "I'm
back in the game."

After graduating from high school, Richie and several dozen other new
recruits were taken by bus to a Florida naval air station for
induction.  Navy jets roared overhead.  The recruits were sworn in.
Richie was a member of the United States Navy.

Later that day, an officer in a blue jacket called Richie into a room
and asked him to sit down.

"There's a problem, son," he said.  "You lied on your application."
"What do you mean?"  Richie asked.

The officer explained that they had found a record of Richie's high
school arson incident.  The navy had no intention of allowing anyone
connected to arson to serve on board a navy ship.  Ever.

Richie's stomach fell.  He explained the prankish nature of the
incident and that the judge in the case had expunged the record.  The
officer was unmoved.  He offered to allow Richie to stay in officer
training with the understanding that he could never serve aboard a
naval vessel, and asked him to sign a document to that effect.  Richie
would not sign.  A few hours later Richie was on the street,
heartbroken and disoriented.  He had been a member of the United States
Navy for a day.  Now his plans for a remarkable future had been
smothered in rules and a youthful mistake.  He wandered around for the
next few days, taking stock of his life and wondering how he might ever
replace such a lost opportunity.  When he could think of nothing else
to do, he decided to move back to New York to work for his father.

For three years, Kohler worked long hours and built the mirror division
of his father's company.  Not once did he touch his dive gear, which
remained in storage in the basement at Fox Glass.  One day he was
called to a window-repair job at the Wantagh South Bay Dive Center, a
scuba shop on eastern Long Island.  While working, he noticed a
photograph of a diver on a shipwreck.  The man in the picture looked to
be excavating faucets from a bathtub.  Kohler asked the shop owner, a
man named Ed Murphy, about the photo.

"That's the Andrea Doria," Murphy said.

Kohler had read books about the Andrea Doria and knew that the ship had
sunk off New York, but he had never processed that anyone could dive
it.  Murphy pulled out piles of Doria snapshots.  This was not the kind
of wreck Kohler had seen in Florida, the type shredded by nature and
surrendered to sea life.  The Doria looked like a Hollywood shipwreck,
with intact rooms and identifiable plumbing and echoes of life and
tragedy.

"I want to dive that," Kohler blurted.  The suddenness of his
declaration surprised him-he had thought nothing about diving for three
years.

"Oh, no, no, no, no," Murphy scolded.  "The Doria is something you work
up to.  It's at two hundred and fifty feet.  It's only for the best
divers."

"I was the best," Kohler said.  He told Murphy about his Florida
spearfishing experience.

"This ain't spearfishing, friend," Murphy said.  "But I'll tell you
what.  I got a group of customers going out this weekend to a wreck
called the USS San Diego.  It's a World War I cruiser laying in the
sand, sunk by a German mine.  It's a good wreck.  You can come along.
It's at a hundred and ten feet-you should be able to handle it.  Bring
your gear."

"I'll be there," Kohler said.

Kohler rushed to the basement at Fox Glass.  His equipment was dusty
and mildewed.  He unpacked and hosed off his tank, regulator, mask, and
fins.  The smell of mummified neoprene wafted from his suit.

That weekend, Kohler set sail for the San Diego.  When the dive boat
reached the wreck site, he began to gear up.  The other divers
snickered and coughed.  Kohler had no gloves, no hood, no boots- just a
Farmer John-style wet suit that did not even cover his arms.  Someone
asked if he had planted corn that morning.

"It's freezing down there," a diver told him.  "Florida's a long way
off, kid."

"Ah, I'll be all right," Kohler said.

A minute into the dive, Kohler was shivering.  The green-gray water was
no more than fifty degrees.  When he reached the wreck he realized it
was upside down, or a "turtle."  He swam along the side, looking for a
way in, and finally found a compartment open to the ocean.  Kohler had
no training in digging or sifting or the other fine arts of excavation.
He just stuffed his hand into the silt and came out with dozens of
bullets.  Amazing.  His body began to shake from the cold.  He checked
his watch-he had been down only five minutes.  He began his ascent lest
he die of exposure.  On the way up he stared at the bullets.  The
ammunition had traveled directly from World War I into his hands.  He
was hooked.

After that, Kohler began to buy proper Northeast wreck-diving gear: dry
suit, gloves, a fifty-dollar knife.  He signed up for all the

dive shop's charters.  He seemed to gravitate instinctively to areas
rich in artifacts; often, he recovered items others had spent years
passing by.  He moved fearlessly about the Oregon, the San Diego, and
other wrecks, and penetrated areas that scared instructors.  Diving was
back in his bloodstream.  The fall and heave of the ocean, the grumble
of the charter boat's engines, the gray-blue of inlet waters, the white
smear of the Milky Way's reflection in the midnight water-it all
reminded him of the good times he'd enjoyed as shipmate to his father,
the summer years when his dad was giant and the water could take a kid
anywhere.

It seemed to Kohler that in wreck diving, a person could still go
anywhere.  He read in a dive magazine about a group of men who had
chartered a boat in 1967 to dive the Doria.  One of those men, John
Dudas, had recovered the ship's compass.  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 tcue meaning of the word cold, Dudas was astronaut, mercenary,
gladiator, and porpoise all rolled into one.

As he accumulated experience, Kohler evolved his own brand of bravery.
On one San Diego dive, he squeezed through a rotted hole into a room
black with oil.  In zero visibility, he filled his green mesh bags with
china, lanterns, telescopes, and bugles, then divvied up the bounty to
colleagues topside.  The dive earned him notice in enthusiast
magazines.  On other wrecks-the Oregon, the Relief, the Coimbra, the
Resor-he dug into silt and swam into collapsed spaces, a prescription
for disorientation.  He always exited with air in his tanks.  More
often than not, he swam out with spoils from these dangerous rooms. All
the while, he developed an insatiable appetite for artifacts.  The more
he recovered, the more he lusted for.

One day, Murphy called Kohler aside for a private conference.  He told
him of a group of six divers-a gang, really-that he believed to be
Kohler's kindred spirits.  The gang had no formal name, but others
called them the Thugs.  They were fearsome, Murphy said, in their
appetite for artifacts and their reputation for hard living.  But they
were also among the best divers on the eastern seaboard.

"They dive crazy deep, Kohler," Murphy said.  "They go places no one
else goes.  They're your kind."

"Can you introduce me?"  Kohler asked.

"Listen.  Some people consider them pirates raping the shipwrecks-"

"Now you have to introduce me," Kohler said.  Murphy invited the gang
on one of the dive shop's charters to the Oregon.  Kohler signed up,
too.  Murphy made the introductions.  The Thugs comprised six men-five
blue-collar workers and an aerospace engineer-each of whom had at least
ten years of deep-wreck diving experience.  They were loud and rowdy
aboard the boat, but on the shipwreck they became transformed.  Kohler
watched as the gang melded into a single entity, flashing hand signals
and lining up for what was obviously a plan.  They stuffed one member,
Pinky, into a tiny hole in a cargo hold on the stern, then took turns
bagging the portholes, moonshine jugs, dishes, and other artifacts
Pinky extracted.  Every member seemed to anticipate every other
member's movement, so that no motion was wasted and the maximum tonnage
poured forth into their coffers.  Kohler had never seen such teamwork.
As a kid who had grown up admiring beautifully built machines, he felt
as if he could watch these men work forever.

Topside, the Thugs celebrated their haul by pounding beers, swearing at
the heavens, and consuming enough cold cuts to open a floating
delicatessen.  Kohler showed them the two gargantuan lobsters he had
captured aboard the wreck.  They scoffed.  "Where the hell are your
artifacts?  If you want to catch lobster you can stay on the goddamn
jetty."  Kohler smiled and asked if he could dive with the gang
again.

The Thugs did not like outsiders, but they liked Kohler.  The kid had
matched them drink for drink, and he hated the same charter captains
they did.  Best of all, he seemed at one with their pirate
sensibilities.  They made him a proposition.  "You're the beermeister,"
they said.  "You bring the beer and you can come along on our next
charter."

Kohler brought waterfalls of beer, and he continued bringing it for a
year.  He'd never known men who partied so hard.  The gang raised hell
in pizza joints before dives, mooned passing family vessels, wore
plastic pig noses and snorted at enemy boat captains, all the while
consuming booze and food in quantities that would shame a frat house.
In between the fun, the gang threw an education into Kohler the likes
of which a diver could not purchase for any price.

Like army sergeants, the men stripped Kohler of his civilian equipment
and began to outfit him in the gear of the great wreck diver.  His
harness?  It sucked-buy this kind.  His lights?  Trash the Florida shit
and buy brighter-this is the Atlantic, for Christ's sake.  His
fifty-dollar knife?  Too goddamn fancy; use a cheapo you won't chase
and drown for if you drop it.  The lessons were clear: if a diver was
going to go places no other men dared, he had better have the hardware
to do it.

Then the men set about to strip him of old thinking.  They pushed him
to study deck plans and photographs in order to determine a wreck's
meatiest locations; divers who barreled in and dug blindly for prizes
never bagged up like a man with knowledge.  They preached a group ethos
whereby the gang worked together and shared the spoils; Kohler should
always expect to bag another guy's stuff or finish another's hard labor
or do whatever else it took to maximize the haul.  And Kohler's
cutthroat attitude toward artifacts?  Beautiful, baby, but not inside
the group.  Inside the group, remember this: we never fuck each
other.

The Thugs did their best teaching on the way to the wrecks, and their
method was ancient and indelible.  They discussed how a wreck's tilt
betrayed where its artifacts lay.  They revealed the beauty of using
brains and a steel wedge over brawn and a sledgehammer.  They were
living encyclopedias of dive accidents.  They studied the sport's close
calls, bends hits, and drownings, deconstructing each incident until
they understood its genesis and could intuit its prevention.  After
years of absorbing how other men had fucked up and died, they believed,
a diver was that much less likely to do it himself.  The divers
battered Kohler with talk of survival.  They taught him that so long as
he was breathing he was okay.  They taught him to answer a rising panic
by slowing down, falling back, and talking him

self through the situation.  They branded into him the horror of
shooting to the surface without decompressing, and when they said, "I'd
rather slit my throat than take that kind of bends hit," he believed
them because they had seen men climb aboard a boat with their blood
foaming and their hearts choking.  They warned him- relentlessly-about
the "snowball effect," the process whereby a diver ignores a minor
problem or two only to encounter other problems that combine with the
earlier ones to doom him.  "Always answer the first problem immediately
and fully," they said, "or you're fucking dead."

Kohler took in every word.  When they brought him to the most dangerous
wrecks he held his own, bagged up, and stayed safe.  Over the next
year, he signed up for every charter the gang booked.  To these men,
Kohler was the young Turk, but he brought a package to the table unlike
any they had seen.  The kid knew no skepticism or cynicism; no goal was
impossible to Kohler, no idea too grand.  He believed, for Christ's
sake, that the gang could take the bell off the bow of the Coimbra,
even though that wreck was four hundred feet long and in 180 feet of
freezing water and no diver had ever been to the bow before.  "That's a
great way to get us killed, smart-ass," they told him, pelting him with
beer cans.  Yet as much as the men laughed at the scope of Kohler's
vision, as much as they broke his balls and delighted in the shades of
red he turned while insisting "It's possible!"  they found themselves
challenged to ask why Kohler might not be right.  A month after Kohler
proposed the hunt for the Coimbra's bell, the gang armed itself with
extra tanks, devised a teamwork-driven battle plan, and became the
first divers ever to explore that shipwreck's bow.  (To this day, no
one has recovered the bell from the wreck.)

One day on the way back from a dive, the divers' discussion turned to
solidarity.  If the gang could add members and organize themselves,
they could charter their own boats, thereby saving money and dictating
destinations.  It would require a commitment-a member would pay for
charters whether he attended or not-but in that way the group could
build real power.

One by one, the men on the trip said, "I'm in."  The gang would need an
official name.  Someone suggested "Atlantic Wreck Divers."

Perfect.  Someone else recommended matching windbreakers.  "We're not a
goddamned bowling team" was the collective reply.  How about matching
denim jackets with skull-and-crossbones patches?  That was more like
it.  Now the six original members had to elect an additional four, and
the vote had to be unanimous.  Only the very best divers were
nominated, matching souls who had dived with the gang and shared their
mind-set.  When Kohler's name was offered, four thumbs went up and two
went sideways.  His heart sank.  No one said a word.  When the two
members with sideways thumbs were convinced they had sufficiently
traumatized Kohler, they turned their thumbs to the sky.  "Ballbreakers
to the end," Kohler thought.  Beer flowed.  Oaths of loyalty were
sworn.  The Atlantic Wreck Divers had been born.

Around the time Kohler became an Atlantic Wreck Diver, he heard through
the grapevine that his father was dating his ex-girlfriend, a woman
Richie had lived with the year before.  He confronted his father, who
admitted it was true and^ that the relationship had been going on for
months.  Richie was devastated.  For a minute he could not speak.

"How could you?"  he finally choked out.

"I'm your father and I can do what I want," the elder Kohler said.  "If
you don't like it, there's the door."

The door.  If Richie walked through it there would be no coming back.
In his father's world a person who took the door could never come back.
Richie's throat lumped and his forehead flushed.  His breath howled as
it rushed through his nostrils.  He could back down now-he could mutter
some face-saving obscenity and save his job and his future and his
relationship with his father, and besides, he did not love the girl
anymore, and who the hell was she to push him through the door?  He
looked into his father's eyes.  The man did not blink.  If Richie
walked now he would lose this man, this strong man who knew the ocean
and understood business and had toughened him to the world.  Could he
do it?  Kohler knew his life.  He could stick with anything if he knew
it was right.  "I'll take the door," he told his father.

That day, Richie removed his possessions from the basement at Fox
Glass.  It would be years before he would see his father again.

Now Richie had to find work.  A glass salesman tipped him to a company
paying top dollar and looking for someone with his experience.  A few
days later he was working as a mechanic for Act II Glass and Mirrors, a
business that served New York's Orthodox Jewish community.  He hit it
off with the owner, and four months later he was the company's
foreman.

Over the next two years, Kohler worked hard and provided a vision for
the company.  The owner rewarded the effort by making Kohler a partner.
Life was good again.  During summers, he committed to the Atlantic
Wreck Divers.  The ocean had never seen anything quite like that gang
before.

Food was religion on AWD charters.  Members brought along the finest
cold cuts, cheeses, pepperonis, and pastries, and they did so in
quantities worthy of Roman orgies.  If one man brought his wife's
special tomato-and-mozzarella salad, another man would outdo him the
next week with his wife's slow-cooked pork tenderloin.  The divers
might even barbecue steaks, chicken, and the occasional speared
flounder on the back of the boat.

Rascality was prized even above gluttony.  Often, without warning the
boat captain, the gang would yell, "Swim break!"  and get naked and
jump into the ocean, never letting go of their beer cans as they bobbed
in the water.  Members brought along guns and slung stuffed animals
into the air for target practice.  When a black-tie party boat passed,
the gang would throw beer cans at the vessel and break into their
trademark ditty:

Cat's ass, rat's ass, dirty old twat; 
Sixty-nine douche bags tied in a knot; 
Cocksucker, motherfucker, dicky licker, too; 
I'm a fuckin' scuba diver, who the fuck are you?

If the passing partygoers seemed insufficiently offended, the gang
would seal the deal by mooning the boat.

Every AWD member was known by a nickname.  Pete Guglieri, the oldest
and most levelheaded member, was "Emperor."  Jeff Pagano was "Hateman" for his negative outlook.  Pat Rooney was "Hammer"
for the tool he carried underwater, John Lachenmeyer "Swingin' Jack"
for his tendency to walk around naked, while Brad Sheard, the aerospace
engineer, went by "Dick Whittler" because of the piece of driftwood
he'd tried to whittle into a sailboat that had turned out looking more
phallic than maritime.  Kohler had earned his moniker during a
discussion about Richard Pryor's free basing accident.  Because his
work took him into the most drug-infested sections of Brooklyn, he'd
been able to explain to the gang the difference between cocaine and
crack. After that, he was Crackhead.  Around this time, Kohler met
Felicia Becker, a dark and pretty sales clerk for one of Kohler's
glass-business customers.  She understood his passion for diving.  They
married in the fall of 1989, and shortly after the wedding Felicia
became pregnant.

One night that year, Kohler stopped for dinner at a Spanish restaurant
in Brooklyn.  He was alone.  As he sat at the bar he felt a slap on his
back.  It was his father.  The two had neither seen nor spoken to each
other in five years.  The elder Kohler asked if he could sit down.
Richie told him he could.^

"You're going to be a grandfather," Richie said.  His father did not
even know his son had married.

Richie and his father spent hours catching up on their lives and
families.  Neither man mentioned Richie's old girlfriend.  His father
asked him to come back to Fox Glass.  Richie told him he could not work
for anyone after having been a partner in his own business.  His father
proposed that they become partners and open their own glass company in
New Jersey, and Richie accepted.  He had stuck to his resolve; it was
his father who had moved.  He was happy to be back in the family
business.  He was happier to know that if he committed to something,
even something so wrenching as leaving his father, he could see that
decision through.

In 1990, Kohler and Felicia celebrated the arrival of their first
child, a son.  Kohler worked grueling hours, then devoted his free time
to Atlantic Wreck Divers.  Their handmade, photocopied schedules were
collector's items in the dive community.  The single-page calendar was
strewn with pornographic images taken from cheap men's magazines. Phone
numbers such as 1-800-EAT-SHIT were listed as

contacts.  One schedule promised "beer tasting sessions, pig calling
lessons, lesbian watching, automatic weapons, more beer tasting
sessions, greenhorn bashing ... as well as some great fucking diving."
Another said, "If you don't have our numbers, we don't want you fucking
diving with us."  In the center was a list of dates, boats, and wreck
destinations.  Often the vessel the gang had chartered was the Wahoo,
Steve Bielenda's boat.

For a while, Kohler had no problem using the Wahoo.  But recently
Kohler had clashed with Bielenda, one time nearly coming to blows.  Now
Kohler needed a new boat to get to the Doria.  He had dived several
times with Nagle on the Seeker-to the Durley Chine, the Bidevind, and
the Resor-and had long admired Nagle's legend.  And while Nagle had a
reputation for crudeness and impatience, he had always treated Kohler
with respect.  Kohler signed up for several Seeker charters in 1990 and
1991.  Though Chatterton was practically running Nagle's business by
then, he and Kohler never found themselves together aboard the boat.

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.  Then
Brennan called and said, "You're in," and the words lifted Kohler back
to the days when his father told stories of Mr.  Segal and he became
proud of his last name and the way Germans built machines, and it
carried him across the thousands of pages he had read about World War
II and the courage of men and steel nets stretched across New York, and
it ferried him over the sailboat he and his pal Don had designed to
circle the world, above the navy man who had promised a submarine,
beyond the gear he had used to penetrate alien worlds, and he knew that
he had to be part of this virgin U-boat because for twenty-nine years
it had been part of him.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The SWASTIKAS on the dishes Chatterton recovered from the U-boat
reached through time and chokeholded his imagination.  A person could
spend a lifetime studying Nazis and U-boats, and in the end it was all
just information.  The dishes were heavy.  The swastika's angled arms
rubbed rough against a person's fingertips; even with closed eyes one
could detect the infamous shape.  No one had cataloged or curated or
even touched this china since the U-boat fell; the dishes had traveled
from Hitler's Third Reich directly to Chatterton's living room, and for
that unbroken path they still seemed treacherous on his mantel.

If there were a few in the diving community who still had not heard of
the mystery wreck after Feldman's death, that changed with the
discovery of the dishes.  Now it seemed that every conversation in
every dive shop along the eastern seaboard involved the U-boat and its
possible identity.  Chatterton and Nagle were certain that such
attention would grind against Bielenda's ego; the King of the Deep
could not abide pretenders to his throne, and while he likely did not
yet know the sub's location, they believed it would be only a matter of
time before he wrestled it from his Coast Guard connections and set
sail to raid their wreck.  Ordinarily, the Seeker would have been back
to the submarine the next week-the men were sure that with another dive
or two the U-boat would surrender her name.  But it was now hurricane season, the time of year when windows of opportunity were
measured in hours rather than months.  Landlocked, Nagle renewed his
vow to get sober and work his body back into diving shape for next
season.  Chatterton returned to his research.  If he could not
penetrate the wreck from the ocean, he would try to get inside it
through history.

While a few of the divers had thumbed library books looking for insight
into the wreck, Chatterton continued to research as he had from the
beginning-by submitting written requests to an archivist at the Naval
Historical Center in Washington, D.C. The NHC was the Fort Knox of
naval war records, and it was from the archivist's expertise that
Chatterton hoped to mine hidden nuggets.  But replies took weeks, and
when they did arrive they consisted of one-page general-information
synopses.  If Chatterton was going to penetrate beneath history's
crust, he would have to make the research more personal and
immediate.

Chatterton was not the only man engaged in serious investigation.  From
his home in New Providence, New Jersey, Kohler barrel-rolled into his
collection of U-boat books, devouring titles past midnight even when
his glass company demanded that he be fresh before dawn.  Mornings, he
used one eye to shave and the other to choose additional titles from
his Naval Institute Press catalog, then wrote checks to the company for
sums he hoped his wife would never notice.  He introduced himself at a
German-American club on Route 130 in Burlington, New Jersey, where he
told the elderly membership the story of the mystery U-boat and
recruited volunteers to help him translate the German books he had
purchased.

One day he called a dive charter captain who had once mentioned knowing
a U-boat crewman.  He asked the captain to seek out this U-boat man and
see if he had any suggestions that might help identify the wreck.  The
captain spoke to the veteran and then called Kohler.

"Search the boots," the captain said.  "Huh?"

"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.  And they put their watches and jewelry in their boots,
too, and some of that stuff also had their names."

Kohler resolved to search the boots.  None of the other divers would
think to look inside a rotting old boot; they would likely swim past
footwear in search of more dishes or a builder's plaque or some other
glamorous artifact.  If he could, Kohler would search every boot he
saw.

Then Kohler hit upon another idea, this one maybe his best.  He had
heard that a retired U-boat commander, Herbert Werner, lived in
America.  But Werner was not just any commander.  He had written Iron
Coffins, a memoir that had become a classic in the genre.  Kohler poked
around library white pages until he hit gold.  Werner not only lived in
America, he lived in ever-loving New Jersey.  Kohler got his number
and, trembling, dialed one of the great U-boat commanders.

A man answered in a light German accent.

"Hello, I'm looking for Mr.  Herbert Werner," Kohler said.

"This is Herbert Werner."

Kohler's heart raced.  He might have the answer to the U-boat mystery
before he hung up the phone.

"Sir, my name is Richard Kohler.  I'm a diver.  My colleagues and I
found a U-boat off the New Jersey coast.  Sir, the reason I'm
calling-"

"Everything I have to say I said in my book," Werner stated in an even
and measured tone.  "I have nothing more to say."

"But if I can just ask-"

"Good-bye," Werner said pleasantly, then hung up.

Kohler held the receiver to his ear for a minute before he could bring
himself to replace it.

Weeks had passed since the dishes came out of the wreck.  The divers
had put in dozens of hours of research, and one fact screamed above all
the rest: no U-boat had ever been recorded sunk within one hundred
miles of the wreck site.  To Chatterton, it seemed as if his research
with the archivist at the Naval Historical Center was moving backward.
And he and Nagle could virtually hear Bielenda warming up the Wahoo's engines.  Chatterton hit upon an idea: Why not
put out news of the U-boat discovery to the world?  Surely there were
historians or experts or governments who knew the wreck's identity; why
not expedite the research by going to those who know?  The Seeker would
still enjoy the glory and fame of discovery, Bie-lenda and others
would be precluded from claim-jumping the wreck, and the mystery would
be solved through the Seeker's research.  There was risk in the
idea-namely that someone else would get credit for making the
identification.  Chatterton decided he could handle that scenario.  He
pitched Nagle on writing a press release.  Nagle loved the idea.  "Put
my name and phone number at the bottom," he told Chatterton.

At the local library, Chatterton found a book on how to write press
releases.  At home that night, he came up with this:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE-OCTOBER 10, 1991

DIVERS DISCOVER MYSTERY U-BOAT OFF NEW JERSEY COAST

Captain Bill Nagle and the divers from the Brielle, New Jersey charter
vessel Seeker have located a World War II German U-boat sunk only 65
miles from the New Jersey coast, at approximate latitude 40, longitude
73.30.  The wreck lies upright and is essentially intact, though it
shows damage from an apparent depth charge attack.

The U-boat is in 230 feet of water, making it accessible to only a
select few experienced deep wreck divers.  The submarine was located on
Labor Day, during a Seeker expedition to identify undiscovered wrecks.
On a subsequent trip to the wreck, Seeker crew member John Chatterton
recovered two china dishes from deep within the wreck, each emblazoned
with the Nazi swastika and dated "1942," proof of the sub's origin.

The items recovered from the wreck prove it is a World War II German
U-boat, but which one?  No German submarines were ever reported sunk
within 150 miles of this location, and German records contain no
accounts of U-boats being lost in

New Jersey waters.  Divers from the Seeker will continue to cautiously
probe the wreck to discover its identity, and unravel the mystery of
why it is where it is.  A small piece of naval history may have to be
rewritten.

Contact: Captain Bill Nagle

Kevin Brennan gave Chatterton a black-and-white photo of one of the
dishes to include with the release.  Chatterton made a list of all the
media outlets he knew, a total of ten names, including local
newspapers, the Associated Press, UPI, and diving magazines.  He mailed
a press release and photo to each address.

A day passed without a reply.  Then a few days.  Chatterton checked
Nagle's phone several times.  He called the phone company and asked
that they check Nagle's line.  The phone was working fine.  Finally,
Chatterton called Nagle.  "Well, that didn't work," he said.  "Looks
like it," Nagle grumbled.

Several days later, Nagle's phone rang.  He referred the call to
Chatterton.  It was from a reporter at the Newark Star-Ledger, an
important New Jersey daily newspaper.  The man sounded weary and
uninterested.  His questions dripped with skepticism, as if he were
being forced to interview yet another Billy Bob who had discovered a
spaceship in his backyard.

"So, you supposedly found some mysterious U-boat, huh?"  the reporter
asked.

Chatterton said that he had.  The man asked more questions.  To each,
Chatterton provided a detailed answer.  By the end of the conversation,
the reporter asked if he might visit Chatterton's home.  A day later he
was there taking notes and handling the china.  He said he thought the
story might be good enough to run on page one.

The next morning, Chatterton walked in bathrobe and slippers to the end
of his driveway and picked up the Star-Ledger.  At the bottom was a
headline: U-BOAT WRECK FOUND OFF POINT PLEASANT.  Alongside the story
was a photo of Nagle and Chatterton inspecting the dishes.  Chatterton
ran inside and called Nagle.  The story summed it all up: the dangers
of deep-wreck diving, the ominous

presence of U-boats in American waters, Feldman's death, the ongoing
mystery of the sub's identity.  It also quoted Professor Henry Keatts,
an author and U-boat expert.  "They have definitely found a German
U-boat," Keatts told the paper.  "The mystery is how it ended up where
it is today ... None is supposed to be in this area."  The Star-Ledger
story unleashed a media frenzy.  That evening, Nagle's and Chatterton's
phones rang nonstop with interview requests from radio, television, and
print reporters.  International media ran the story of the mystery
U-boat discovered off the New Jersey coast.  CNN sent a crew. 
Television reporters had Nagle and Chatterton hold the dishes up,
swastika side out, while they interviewed the pair aboard the Seeker. 
Even the tabloid Weekly World News ran a front-page item: NAZI SUB
CAPTURED BY U.S. NAVY SHIP!  The story, fantastical even by that
publication's standards, told not only of the New Jersey U-boat but of
a second U-boat, one that had sailed from Germany into a time warp and
had only surfaced today, its still-youthful crewmen convinced that
Hitler ruled Germany.  It quoted a "Washington-based Navy officer" who
said, "I don't know all that much about time warps, but that seems to
be the only explanation for this whole situation."

Chatterton's phone, which had sat silent for two weeks after the press
release, now rang so relentlessly it threatened his sleep and his
meals.  His mailbox overflowed.  Packages were delivered to him
addressed simply "John Chatterton-Diver-New Jersey."

Many of the contacts came from people who claimed to know the identity
of the U-boat or the explanation for its sinking.  Sons, mothers,
brothers, and grandchildren swore that loved ones had attacked and sunk
a U-boat on a secret mission that the government still refused to
acknowledge.  Others called claiming to have classified U-boat
information.  Still others told of seeing U-boat crewmen swimming onto
American shores to buy bread or attend dances.  One elderly caller told
of meeting an old German man while fishing as a teenager.  "The guy
looked at the spot on our chart we'd been fishing and said that's where
he'd lost his U-boat," the man told Chatterton.  "It was at the same
spot you found your wreck."  Several widows called saying that their
husbands had sunk U-boats but had never received credit.  A
scholarly-sounding man called and said that

the mystery could be solved simply by wiping the dirt from the conning
tower, as U-boats had their numbers painted prominently on the side.

One man called and spoke in a heavy German accent.  "I am looking for
ze diver who found ze U-boat," the man said.  "Okay, that's me,"
Chatterton said.  "Vat ken you tell me about ze diver who died?" "Well,
he was a pretty good diver.  It was a terrible accident."  "His name
vas Feldman?"  "Yeah."

"How do you spell debt?"  "F-E-L-D-M-A-N."  "Vas Feldman a Jew?"
Chatterton hung up after that.

On another day, he received a call from a different man with a thick
German accent.

"Your bubbles are disturbing ze sailors' slumber," the man said before
hanging up abruptly.

Chatterton researched many of the stories he heard, even the ones that
seemed loopy.  Stories of U-boat men mixing into the American
population turned out to be the product of terrified imaginations; on
only a few occasions did men move from U-boats to American soil, and in
those cases the men were saboteurs and spies.  U-boat conning towers
did sport the U-boat's number, as is evidenced in photographs, but only
before World War II began; after that, any such markings were erased or
painted over.  So far, none of Chatterton's leads had inched him any
closer to knowing the mystery submarine.

Kohler, too, was receiving phone calls.  His name had been mentioned in
some of the newspaper stories, and like Chatterton, he heard from
family members seeking credit for a supposed U-boat kill a relative had
made fifty years ago.  He also began to hear from collectors.

"Are there human remains on the boat?"  one man asked.  "We don't know
that yet," Kohler said.  "I'd like to buy a Nazi skull."  "I don't do
that."

"I'll give you two thousand dollars for a skull."

"I told you, I don't do that."

"What the hell do you mean you don't do that?  We won.  Are you some
kind of Nazi lover?"

So-called collectors, Kohler found, got angry fast.  He learned to hang
up on them even faster.

Not every contact with Chatterton came from family or fanatics or
conspiracists.  Early on, he received a letter from the German embassy
in Washington, D.C. It was written by Dieter Leonhard, a captain in the
German navy.  The letter began cordially, acknowledging Chatterton's
discovery and offering assistance in researching the wreck.  Farther
down the page, however, Leonhard made plain Germany's position:

The Federal Republic of Germany retains ownership of the submarines,
regardless of whether the present position of the wreck is within
national territorial waters or not.  Sunken German warships are
principally defined to be "tombs of a seaman's grave."  Diving and
exploring the wreck is therefore not permitted without government
approval, which has been denied in each case to date.  To keep a wreck
a tomb, the FRG prohibits any violation to a World War II sub and will
enforce this condition through legal means.

Chatterton called the phone number on the stationery and was
transferred to Leonhard.  Chatterton told him that he had received the
letter and would be grateful for assistance with documents and
research.  Leonhard said he would be happy to help.  Chatterton then
popped his big question.

"Do you know the identity of the wreck?"

Leonhard said that the German government often relied on a man named
Horst Bredow at the U-boat Archive in Cuxhaven-Altenbruch as a
repository for such information.  He offered Chatterton the contact
information.  Then Leonhard reiterated what he had written in the
letter-that Germany did not permit diving on sunken U-boats.

"Which U-boat is it?"  Chatterton asked.

"The one you found," Leonhard replied.

"Yes, but what is the specific U-boat designation?"

"I do not know."

"What about the exact location?"  Chatterton asked.

"I do not know that, either."

"I'm going to be honest with you," Chatterton said.  "I want to be
respectful.  You don't know what wreck this is, and therefore you can't
lay claim to it.  My goal is to identify the wreck, to put a name on
the tombstone.  I'm going to continue diving it until that happens."

"You understand our position, Mr.  Chatterton.  We do not want divers
descending on this U-boat and scattering any human remains that might
be on board and desecrating the wreck," Leonhard said.  "We cannot and
will not allow that."

"I understand that and I don't intend to allow that to happen,"
Chatterton said.  "It's my first priority to be considerate and
respectful.  You have my word on that."

By now, Chatterton understood Leonhard's position.  The man could not
formally grant a diver permission to explore a war grave.  He sensed,
however, that Leonhard-who had kept an even and pleasant tone
throughout the conversation-would not make official trouble for him so
long as he treated the wreck with respect.  The men thanked each other
for their time and ended the call.

About a week after the first U-boat story appeared, Chatterton began to
compile several promising leads.  One of the first came from Harry
Cooper, the founder and president of Sharkhunters International, a
thousands-strong group based in Florida and "dedicated to preserving
the history of the U-Bootwaffe," as their motto read.  Chatterton had
seen the group's text-crammed, exclamation point-filled
newsletters-homemade-looking publications that mixed interviews,
intrigue, history, editorials, criticism, and even the occasional
classified ad.  Despite the wild look of its mailings, Shark-hunters
counted American historians, former U-boat commanders and crewmen,
professors, U.S. naval veterans, and other experts among its members.
Cooper urged Chatterton to join Sharkhunters, saying that the group had
deep and far-reaching contacts he believed could help solve the
mystery.  Cooper asked questions no one

yet had: Does your wreck have saddle tanks?  Does your wreck have two
stern torpedo tubes or only one?  The answers could easily be gleaned
while diving, Cooper explained, and would reveal much about the
U-boat's type and the year it might have sailed.  Chatterton resolved
to inspect the wreck for that information on the next dive and report
back to Cooper with the answers.

One morning, a man phoned Chatterton claiming to have sunk a U-boat
from a blimp in 1942.  A month earlier such a claim would have sounded
like another bit of lunacy to Chatterton.  But in his research,
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.  So Chatterton listened.

"I'm an old man and my mind ain't so good," the man said.  "I don't
remember all the details.  But I know I sunk a U-boat from a blimp."
"Go ahead, sir, I'm listening.  I really appreciate the phone call."
"Well, I was based out of Lakehurst, New Jersey.  I attacked the U-boat
close to there.  I sunk it with a depth charge.  I'm sorry, but that's
all I remember.  I hope that helps."

Chatterton recorded the man's story on his legal pad and made a note to
research any reports his contact at the Naval Historical Center might
find for him about blimp attacks on U-boats in the area of the wreck.

Another morning, Chatterton drove to the Naval Weapons Station Earle in
Monmouth County, New Jersey, and showed a videotape of the wreck to
experts in weapons, ordnance, and demolition.  They watched the tape
again and again.  They talked among themselves and used technical words
and physics terms in their discussions.  They arrived at this
consensus:

the damage to the U-boat's control room looked to be caused by
explosion rather than by collision;

the shape and direction of the damaged metal indicated that the
explosion likely occurred from outside the submarine; and

the damage was likely caused by a force far greater than a depth
charge, the weapon used so often by Allied forces against U-boats.

Chatterton took notes on everything.  He asked the men if they might be
kind enough to fashion a guess as to what had caused such cataclysmic
damage.

"We can't be certain," one of the men said.  "But if we had to guess,
we would guess it was damaged by a direct torpedo hit."

A direct torpedo hit?  Driving home, Chatterton turned the idea over in
his mind a hundred times.  Who would have fired such a torpedo?  An
account of an American submarine that had sunk a U-boat would have made
every history book, yet there had been no such incident anywhere close
to the wreck site.  Could another U-boat have mistakenly sunk a friend?
It had happened before, but mostly among U-boat wolf packs-groups of
U-boats that hunted enemy ships together-and there was simply no record
of a wolf pack anywhere near the wreck site.  One thing was certain:
the idea that a U-boat had limped from some other location with such an
injury-as Nagle and some divers left room to believe-seemed impossible.
To Chatterton, whatever had blown up that U-boat had done it at just
the place in the ocean where the divers had found it.

The Star-Ledger story was barely a week old and already Chatterton had
gathered reams of information from sources great and small.  The best,
however, were still to come.

One arrived in the form of a meeting at Nagle's house attended by
Nagle, Chatterton, and Major Gregory Weidenfeld, a Civil Air Patrol
historian who had contacted Nagle through a newspaper reporter.
Chatterton had heard of the CAP; they were a group of civilian pilots
organized in 1941 by New York's Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and others to
fly small, privately owned airplanes to help defend coastal shipping.
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 mini bombs
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.  Weidenfeld explained that over the course of the war the CAP
had detected more than 150 subs and had dropped depth charges on
several of them.

"We sank two U-boats," Weidenfeld said.  "But we never got credit for
either of them."

"I've read about those incidents," Chatterton said.  "You guys believe
the navy didn't want to credit civilians."

"That's right," Weidenfeld said.  "The navy didn't want to acknowledge
it because it would have terrified the public to think that average
civilians were needed to fight the U-boats, and that the U-boats were
coming so close to our shores.  Anyway, one of the kills was off the
Florida coast.  The other was in New Jersey."  Chatterton got out his
pen.  Weidenfeld told the story.  "On July 11, 1942, two of our pilots
in a Grumman Widgeon spotted a U-boat about forty miles off the coast
just north of Atlantic City.  The guys chased the U-boat for four hours
until it began to rise to periscope depth.  When it finally surfaced,
they dropped a three-hundred-twenty-five-pound depth charge, and the
bomb exploded- they could see an oil slick streaking on the surface
where the sub had been.  They dropped the other depth charge right into
the oil slick.  It was a kill, absolutely.  The pilots are both dead
now.  But I've been working for years to get my guys credit for this. I
think you found their U-boat."

Chatterton was enthralled by the account.  Weidenfeld had provided an
exact date and a location only about twenty-five miles from the wreck
site.  If Chatterton could find a list of U-boats lost in American
waters in July 1942-even if the boat was recorded sunk some distance
away-he might find a way to explain its movement to the wreck site and
solve the mystery.  He thanked Weidenfeld and promised to do all he
could to resolve the question of whether the lost sub was the one the
Civil Air Patrol had killed nearly fifty years

ago.  A day later, Professor Keatts said of the story to the New York
Post, "This is the most reasonable account I've heard so far.  It could
very easily be the same U-boat."

At around the same time, another unusual phone call came in, this one
from a collector of Nazi memorabilia.  This hobbyist, however, made no
offer to buy artifacts.

"Among other things I collect photos of U-boat commanders," the man
told Chatterton.  "I correspond with a lot of these guys.  One of them
is Karl-Friedrich Merten, the eighth-most-successful U-boat ace of
World War II.  He read your story in a German newspaper with great
interest and has some information he would like to share with you by
mail if you'd be kind enough to provide your address."

"Absolutely," Chatterton replied.

Over the next several weeks, letters arrived from Germany.  In them,
Merten thanked Chatterton and the divers for their efforts.  He also
told a singular tale.

His colleague Hannes Weingartner had also been a U-boat commander, and
like Merten had been promoted to training flotilla commander, a
prestigious land-based position.  Weingartner, however, still had
battle in his blood and in 1944, at the advanced age of thirty-five,
walked away from the desk and back down through the hatch of a U-boat.
His assignment: to take U-851, a Type IXD2, or "U-cruiser," U-boat
designed for the longest-range patrols, to the Indian Ocean to carry
supplies to Far East German bases and deliver cargo to the Japanese
navy.

The assignment, Merten speculated, might not have been what Weingartner
had in mind.  He believed Weingartner to have been "a submariner of the
first hour," meaning that the man's early war roots and instincts-to
aggressively hunt and kill enemy ships-had never withered.

"I had the impression that Weingartner considered the position of the
U-boat war not very different from his last command [of] Sept.  '39,"
Merten wrote.  "I don't know the text of his patrol order, but U-851
was certainly not destinated [sic] for the Indian Ocean but for the
U.S. coast."

To Merten, it seemed reasonable that the tameness of Wein

gartner's assignment might have coaxed his colleague toward New

York.

"I myself am pretty sure that the wreck you have found will be that of
U-851," Merten wrote.

The words "I myself danced off the air-mail stationery and into
Chatterton's imagination.  In Merten's letter, he now possessed genuine
inside information delivered direct by a U-boat ace, a theory that
bypassed textbooks and historians and got right to the heart of the
matter.  Merten knew his friend, and now Chatterton knew Merten, and
for this Chatterton could not remember a time when he felt more
excited.

As with all the information Chatterton had gathered, he told Kohler
nothing of his contact with Merten.  Though he had admired Kohler's
enthusiasm aboard the boat, he still viewed him as just another guy
along for the dive, a man whose artifact lust likely precluded any
appetite for history or artistry.  Instead, he shared his findings with
Yurga, who continued to study the hard-core technical aspects of U-boat
construction and layout, and who provided sound scientific counterpoint
to whatever theories Chatterton entertained.  Through it all, a
thrilling idea had begun taking shape in Chatterton's thinking.  In the
course of two weeks he had contact with a U-boat ace, a blimp pilot, a
historian, and the president of a U-boat club.  Each gave accounts of
history unavailable in books and sometimes at odds with books.  To
Chatterton, who had hungered since childhood for better explanations,
for the chance to see for himself, this stretching of history's canvas
was a revelation.

While Chatterton continued to field phone calls, Kohler studied U-boats
like an undergraduate before a final exam.  He dedicated every free
moment to understanding the U-boat-its construction, its evolution, its
command chain, its lore.  Much of his study was driven by an overriding
motivation: to position himself to haul tonnage from the wreck.  In his
diving lifetime, he could not recall a moment like the one he'd
experienced when he'd first laid eyes on Chatterton's Nazi china.  As
he'd held that dish in his hands he'd understood that he had possession
of something transcendent.  He hadn't been able to enunciate it to
himself at the moment, but he'd known what he was feeling.  In a single
piece of china, every quality

that made a shipwreck artifact great-history, symbolism, beauty,
mystery-seemed to come together to a brilliant point.

As the days passed and Kohler delved deeper into his U-boat studies, he
found himself paying closest attention to those books about the lives
and times of the U-boat man, and this surprised him because his mission
was so forcefully committed to identification and artifact recovery.
Reading about men did not seem like book work to Kohler.  Instead, he
found himself transported; he could feel the inside of a U-boat not
just as a machine but as the backdrop to a human being's life.  He
could feel the grueling and claustrophobic conditions under which these
soldiers waged war, the coldness of a live torpedo next to a man's
sleeping face, the smell of six-week-old underwear, the spittle in the
expletives of men crammed too close to one another for too long, the
splatter of a single icy condensation droplet on the neck of an
enlisted man finishing a six-hour shift.  Technical information
interested him, yes, but technology did not make his heart
pound-nothing did-like the idea of a U-boat man waiting helplessly
while Allied depth charges tumbled through the water toward his
submarine, the ominously dainty ping ... ping ... ping ... of Allied
sonar a prelude to imminent explosion.  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.  One
source said that no fighting force in the history of warfare had taken
the casualties the U-boat men had and still kept fighting.  As October
wore on, Kohler found himself wondering if any crewmen were still
aboard the mystery U-boat, and he wondered also if their families knew
that they were there.

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 paniculate 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.

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 aiT 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 wheel-house.  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 bee lined 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 Seekers 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.

"Well, that's it, man," Sheard said.  "You've identified the U-boat.
All you have to do is find crewman Horenburg.  Congratulations."

"This might be the best artifact I've ever taken from any wreck,"
Chatterton told the divers.  "This guy actually carved his name into
the knife.  It's not like a tag that was made in a factory.  This is
like a personal message.  All I need to do is find Horenburg and the
U-boat is identified."

By this time, Kohler had climbed aboard the boat.  He and the other
divers took turns inspecting the knife and congratulating Chatterton,
each of them gracious but also disappointed that he had not been the
one to identify the wreck.  "Call me tomorrow when you find Horenburg
and let me know which boat this is," the divers told Chatterton. Packer
and Gatto, who had penetrated only the wreck's stern on their second
dive, shook Chatterton's hand.

As the Seeker steamed back toward shore, Chatterton joined Nagle in the
wheelhouse and took over the helm, and the two began a postmortem on
the day.  A few minutes later, Kohler walked in.  Nagle offered him a
beer and invited him to stay.  Kohler mumbled additional
congratulations to Chatterton.  Nagle sensed that Kohler was still sore
about Chatterton's decision to dive first, and perhaps a little jealous
over the knife.  Never one to pass up a potential confrontation,
especially after a few beers, Nagle elbowed the divers in trademark
Nagle fashion.

"Richie, if you don't like John splashing first, maybe you should put
up a grate and lock him out," Nagle said, cackling.  "Maybe you should
leave him a sign on the gyrate that says, Closed for Inventory."  "

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.

"Maybe we should get things out in the open," Kohler said.

"Fine," Chatterton replied.  "I'll tell you this.  I don't like you
Atlantic Wreck Divers.  You tried to fuck me on the Doria."

"Yeah, okay, we did," Kohler said.

"If it wasn't for one honest guy from your little club, we would never
have known.  I'm not going to tell you who it is, but it's obvious only
one of you guys has a conscience."

"Look," Kohler said.  "I already came to terms with Bill on the grate.
We did try to fuck you, yeah, I admit it.  Do you want an apology?  Do
you want me to start crying and beg your forgiveness?  Is that what you
want?"

"I don't need an apology," Chatterton said.  "We beat you at your own
game.  That grate was the best revenge.  For me, it ended there."

"So you won," Kohler said.  "I'm not going to flog myself.  It ends
there for me, too.  And by the way, I don't like your kind either.
Everything is so serious with you about diving.  At least we know how
to have fun."

"Mooning families on passing boats and making up pornographic dive
schedules and wearing little matching uniforms is fun?"  "Hell yeah,
it's fun.  You should try it."  "That's the problem with you guys-" "We
got no problems-" "Oh, you got plenty of problems-"

"Ah, fuck it," Kohler said, downing the last of his beer.  He left the
wheelhouse for the deck, where he found a seat on top of a giant
cooler.  A few minutes later, Chatterton came down the ladder and sat
beside him.  For a while, neither spoke.

"Listen, Richie," Chatterton finally said.  "I don't need to be the
first one to splash every time.  If you don't mind setting the hook,
you're welcome to go first next time.  But remember, tying in is a
gamble.  If you run into trouble, you can blow your whole dive while
you fix things."

"I don't mean to be a prick," Kohler said.  "I respect you.  I just
want a fair shot."

Again neither spoke for a few minutes.  Then Kohler began to tell
Chatterton that he was feeling like the U-boat meant something more to
him than the chance to load up on Nazi artifacts.  He explained that he
had been buying and reading books like a man possessed since his first
trip to the wreck; that maybe something in his German heritage was
connecting with this mission; that while he was eager to recover
artifacts from this U-boat, he also found himself captivated by the
history of the U-boat war and the men who had fought it.  He asked if
Chatterton had yet read Gunter Hessler's book The U-boat War in the
Atlantic, 1939-1945, then provided a detailed review.  To Chatterton,
these were not the typical leanings of an Atlantic Wreck Diver.

Chatterton walked into the salon to get a package of peanut butter
crackers.  He came back and sat beside Kohler again.

"Listen," Chatterton said.  "I got a lot of calls and letters after the
media got hold of this story.  I think you might really find some of
them interesting."

For the next three hours, Chatterton regaled Kohler with news of the
last few weeks: of hearing from the Civil Air Patrol, of the blimp
pilot, of the families and kooks and self-professed experts, of Harry
Cooper of Sharkhunters, of U-boat ace Merten and the story of his
colleague Weingartner, who might just have had the gumption to flout
orders and take his Type IX submarine to New Jersey instead of to the
Indian Ocean.  Kohler gulped the information and asked endless
questions, all of which Chatterton found incisive and open-ended.  As
night fell and the Seeker made its way into the inlet near Brielle, the
divers walked toward the salon to pack their belongings.  Inside,
Chatterton asked Kohler for his address.

"You going to send me something?"  Kohler asked.

"I'd like to send you the videotape I shot today, and some others,"
Chatterton said.  "You have to promise me that you won't show them to
anyone or let them out of your hands-I've been burned by that before,
as you know.  But I think it can really help you navigate the wreck.
I'm going to trust you with this."

"Thanks, man," Kohler said.  He jotted down his address.  "You have my
word."

That night, Chatterton took the knife he had discovered and placed it
on his desk.  The name HORENBURG looked as clearly carved as the day
the crewman had inscribed it.

"Who were you?"  he asked as he gazed at the knife.  "What happened to
your U-boat, and who were you?"

He closed the lights to his office and made his way to his bedroom.

"Just another day or two," he said to himself.  "Just another day or
two and I'll have the answer to the mystery of the U-boat."

THAT LOCATION

The morning after Chatterton recovered the knife he set out to find
Horenburg.  To this end, he wrote a letter detailing his discovery and
mailed it to four experts, each of whom he believed could trace
Horenburg and thereby identify the mystery U-boat.  Those experts
were:

Harry Cooper, president of Sharkhunters, whose connections ran deep in
the U-boat world

Karl-Friedrich Merten, the U-boat ace in Germany with whom Chatterton
had been corresponding (and who believed the mystery sub to be U-851,
the one commanded by his colleague)

-Charlie Grutzemacher, curator of the International Submarine Document
Center in Deisenhofen, Germany, a renowned repository of U-boat
information

Horst Bredow, a U-boat veteran and founder of the U-boat Archive in
Cuxhaven-Altenbruch, Germany, the world's leading repository of
personal U-boat information and the place to which the German
government often referred researchers

By Chatterton's calculation, it should take no more than a week to
receive the answer.  For his part, Kohler continued to rampage through
historical texts, learning the patrols of America-bound U-boats.  In

these pursuits-Chatterton with the knife, Kohler with the books- each
was answering to more than a mystery.  Each believed that once the
U-boat was identified, he had a responsibility to the families of the
fallen soldiers and to history to explain why the U-boat was in
American waters, how it had slipped through history's cracks, and how
it had met its end.  And if there was a Mrs.  Horenburg, she deserved
to know why her husband lay buried off the New Jersey coast and why no
one in the world knew that he was there.

A week passed without reply.  Then another week.  Chatterton sat beside
his phone willing it to ring.  He checked between the pages of
junk-mail flyers for the pale blue of an airmail envelope.  A month
passed without a reply.  He wrote to his sources again.  Each told him
the same thing: There's been some confusion-we're still working on it.
Just after Christmas, nearly two months after his initial inquiry,
Chatterton's phone rang.  It was a U-boat enthusiast with whom
Chatterton had recently become acquainted.  The man had news.

"The knife is a dead end, Mr.  Chatterton.  You have to go back to the
wreck."

"What do you mean it's a dead end?"

"There was only one man in the U-boat service named Horenburg.  And he
never served in the western Atlantic."

"What U-boats did he serve on?"

"He doesn't remember."

For a moment Chatterton could not speak.  Only the sound of telephone
static convinced him that the man was still on the line.  Finally, he
choked out the question.

"Horenburg is alive?"

"He's alive," the man said.

"He survived the sinking?"

"I didn't say that."

"What did Horenburg say?"

"He said it's a dead end."

"What's a dead end?"

"The knife.  He doesn't remember the knife."

"What else did he say?"

"Forget it, Mr.  Chatterton.  You should move on."

"Wait a minute.  I would like to talk to Horenburg-"

"That's impossible.  He talks to nobody."

"Please.  Tell him I'd like to speak to him.  This is everything to me.
If this is his knife I'd like to return it to him."

"He doesn't want to talk."

"Can you at least tell me what U-boat he was on?"

"He doesn't recall anything.  You need to go on from here.  I'm sorry I
can't help you further.  I must go.  Good-bye."

Chatterton sat stunned, unable to hang up.  Horenburg is alive?  He
doesn't remember the knife?  He talks to nobody?  Chatterton held the
phone to his ear, oblivious to the phone company's recorded warnings
while he processed the impossible: A knife with a crewman's name-the
best artifact I have ever found-and it's a dead end?

For the next several days, Chatterton thought obsessively of Horenburg.
The man had survived the war, lived into old age, and was in a position
to announce the answer to the mystery.  Yet he wouldn't talk. Why not? 
What reason could he have for not at least providing his U-boat
number?

A few days later, Chatterton received replies from Merten, Bredow, and
Grutzemacher.  Each of them had reached the same conclusion: there had
been only one Horenburg in the German navy- Martin Horenburg, a
Funkmeister, or senior radioman, in the U-boat service.  His last
patrol had been aboard U-869, a U-boat sunk by Allied forces off Africa
in 1945.  That U-boat's entire crew, including Horenburg, had been
killed in the attack.  It was the only patrol U-869 had ever made.  It
had happened 3,650 miles from the mystery wreck site.

Now Chatterton was furious.  He was certain that his three German
sources-all respected experts-were correct about Horenburg.  That
meant, however, that the U-boat enthusiast had not spoken to Martin
Horenburg, if he had spoken to anyone.  On the spot, Chatterton wrote
the man off and resolved never to speak to him again.  Still, he
remained unconvinced that his German sources had pursued the matter to
the ends of the earth, as he would have.  Perhaps there had been
another Horenburg they had overlooked.  Chatterton had heard about a
U-boat memorial in Germany in

scribed with the names of U-boat veterans killed in action.  If he
traveled to Germany, he could inspect that memorial himself, every last
listing if necessary, in search of another Horenburg.  Yes, if he went
to Germany, he could study that memorial, visit the U-boat museum, and
have at Bredow's archive himself.  He checked his calendar.  March
would be a good month to do this right.

Chatterton invited Yurga and Kohler to accompany him to Germany.  Yurga
accepted.  Kohler, who ran his own business, could not free himself for
the weeklong expedition.  But the invitation moved him.  Chatterton was
serious about this mission and would not have included anyone he did
not respect or whose help he could not rely on.

"I'll work stateside," Kohler told Chatterton.  "I'll keep my end going
here."

As the March trip approached, Chatterton received a telephone call
unlike any since the media storm had begun.  An elderly gentleman
introduced himself as Gordon Vaeth, a former intelligence officer for
the Atlantic Fleet airships during World War II-the blimp squadrons. He
had read of the divers' discovery and^ asked about any research
Chatterton had undertaken.  Chatterton told him of his slow
correspondence with the Naval Historical Center.

"If you'd like to come to Washington, I would be more than happy to
introduce you to the heads of the center, who are my friends," Vaeth
said.  "Maybe they can help you find what you're looking for.  I don't
intend to insinuate myself, but if I can help in any way it should be
my pleasure."

Chatterton could scarcely believe his good fortune.  Vaeth had been on
the spot for antisubmarine warfare, in intelligence no less.  And he
had connections at the NHC.  They made a date to meet in Washington for
late February.  As Chatterton hung up, he wondered if the trip to
Germany would be necessary anymore.  If anyone knew the answer to the
mystery, it had to be the American government.  Now, with Vaeth's help,
he would be escorted straight to the source.

A few days later, Chatterton made the four-hour drive to Washington,
D.C. He was due to meet Vaeth at the Naval Historical Center at 10:00
A.M. He arrived an hour early and pulled into the vast

Washington Navy Yard, an ancient-looking complex of trolley tracks,
cobblestoned roads, libraries, and classrooms.  A retired navy
destroyer moored in the Anacostia River peeked at Chatterton from
behind a stone building as he made his way to the NHC, storehouse for
many of the navy's historical documents and artifacts.  Inside, a
snowy-haired man dressed in a tweed jacket rose to greet Chatterton. He
introduced himself as Gordon Vaeth.

The men became acquainted, and Vaeth outlined his plan for the visit.
He would introduce Chatterton to Bernard Cavalcante, the head of
operational archives and a world-renowned U-boat expert, and Dr.  Dean
Allard, the director of the center.  Those two men, Vaeth suggested,
had access to nearly everything the United States knew about U-boats.
Chatterton breathed deeply.  He now believed himself minutes away from
the answer to the mystery.

Vaeth escorted Chatterton into Cavalcante's office.  These rooms, Vaeth
explained, contain the vast majority of American naval records, and it
is Cavalcante, a passionate historian born for the job, who oversees
them.  "And he's particularly expert in U-boats," Vaeth whispered as
Cavalcante, a slightly built, middle-aged man in a checked sport coat
and drooping reading glasses, emerged from an adjacent room. Cavalcante
greeted the men warmly but with a cocked eyebrow, as if to say, "Oh,
jeez, another U-boat nut in my office."

The men sat down and Vaeth asked Chatterton to tell his story.
Chatterton was direct and economical.  He and other divers had
discovered a World War II U-boat about sixty miles off the New Jersey
coast.  They had recovered artifacts proving as much, yet had not been
able to identify the submarine.  They had checked the history books but
found no mention of any U-boat within one hundred miles of the wreck
site.  The divers had used loran to return to the site three times, so
the location was solid.  They had shot videotapes, a compilation of
which he had brought along.

For a moment there was only silence.  Cavalcante looked to Vaeth with
the vaguest grin, then to Chatterton.  He reached into his desk and
pushed some papers forward for Chatterton to sign-if the NHC was to
accept the video, it had to be bequeathed properly.  Chatterton had
never felt so important signing his name.  Cavalcante took the tape,
then looked Chatterton in the eye.

"We are the United States Navy, sir," Cavalcante said.  "We know a good
bit about what lies in the ocean.  But we cannot necessarily reveal
that information.  You understand that, Mr.  Chatterton, correct?"

"Absolutely, sir, I do."

"We have an accounting of shipwrecks off the East Coast.  We track this
for military reasons, not for historical reasons, not for researchers
or ... if you'll excuse me, for divers.  We have this list here.  But I
cannot show it to you.  I'm sorry."

Chatterton's heart sank.  The answer was on the other side of
Cavalcante's office, and the man would not open the door.  Vaeth
remained seated, erect and dignified, but said nothing.  Cavalcante
said nothing.  Chatterton wondered if the meeting was over.  He was not
willing to allow for that possibility.

"Mr.  Cavalcante, I don't have to see the list," Chatterton said.  "I'm
just interested in this particular wreck at this particular location.
This has become very important to me.  Putting a name on this grave is
the right thing to do for the families, and it's the right thing to do
for history.  There are dozens of dead sailors down there, and no one
seems to know who they are or why they are there

Cavalcante settled his chin between his thumb and forefinger.  Vaeth
cocked his head slightly as if to ask, "Well, what now, Bernie?"
Cavalcante nodded slightly.

"Well, I suppose I can look it up," he said.  "But you cannot have any
photocopies of the information, and you cannot take any photographs
with you."

"That's fine, thank you," Chatterton replied.  "I will be satisfied
with you verbalizing to me whatever information you might have about
this wreck."

Chatterton wrote down the U-boat's latitude and longitude and handed
them to Cavalcante, who excused himself into a fortress of documents.
Vaeth grinned and gave Chatterton a nod that said, Nice going."  The
answer was moments away.

Several minutes later Cavalcante returned, a massive binder under his
arm, and sat at his desk.  He looked at Chatterton with that cocked
eyebrow again.

"Are you sure about that location?"  he asked.

"Positive," Chatterton replied.  "We've been there three times." "Well,
we do not appear to have anything at that location.  There is no
U-boat-or anything else-at that location."

Vaeth's grin, kept in check throughout the meeting, surrendered to a
smile.

"This is fascinating," Cavalcante said finally.  "This is absolutely
fascinating.  Let's take the videotape to Dr.  Allard and watch it
together.  He has to see this.  I have to tell you, Mr.  Chatterton, we
hear from an awful lot of people who believe they've discovered a
U-boat or have secret U-boat information.  It's almost always nothing.
But this is just fascinating."

Cavalcante ushered Vaeth and Chatterton into a stately office.  Soon
the men were greeted by a middle-aged man with wavy salt-and-pepper
hair parted in the middle, wire-rimmed glasses, a bow tie, and a tweed
jacket.  The man introduced himself as Dr.  Dean Allard, director of
the center, and asked his visitors to sit down.

Cavalcante launched into the story.  Mr.  Chatterton, he said, had
found a U-boat off the New Jersey coast: location definite, vintage
definite, casualties definite, videotape available.  All the while,
Allard listened through weary ears.  He had heard such claims a
thousand times.  Always, they were groundless.  Cavalcante paused a bit
for effect.

"Here's the thing, Dr.  Allard," Cavalcante continued.  "I've checked
the books.  There's nothing there."  Allard nodded slowly.

"I see," he said.  "I understand you have a videotape, Mr.  Chatterton.
May we view it?"

As Cavalcante prepared the tape, Allard called William Dudley, his
second in command, into his office.  Allard dimmed the lights and the
five men viewed scenes of Chatterton moving about the conning tower,
then forward toward the torpedo room.  Various murmurs" Fascinating
"Unbelievable," "Astonishing"-wafted through the office until the
forty-minute tape had finished.

"I can't believe there's a World War II German U-boat out there and we
don't know anything about it," Allard said.  "Mr.  Chatterton, if I can
get a navy ship and divers to go to your location, would you be willing
to work with the navy to identify this U-boat?"

It took Chatterton a moment to process the magnitude of the

offer.  He was a New Jersey guy with a couple of scuba tanks fighting
the ocean in an eleven-knot boat.  Now Allard was offering to send a
team of hard-hat divers and the muscle and resources of the United
States Navy to solve his mystery.  He began to fashion a sophisticated
acceptance to fit the grandeur of the moment.  Instead, he could only
utter, "Definitely!"

Dudley stepped forward.  He was the only one in the room not smiling.

"Dr.  Allard, I'm sorry, we can't do that," he said.  "As you know, the
U.S. has filed a complaint against France in international court over
the Confederate ship Alabama.  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."  Allard
contemplated the argument for a moment.  "Well, you're right, Bill,"
Allard said.  He turned to Chatterton.  "I'm disappointed.  But if we
can't actively go out there and help you with the diving, Mr.
Chatterton, we can still provide you with whatever you need in terms of
research assistance here."

Allard stood and removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.  "In
fact, let's start right now.  Bill, would you get the pamphlet
explaining our resources for Mr.  Chatterton?"

Dudley escorted Chatterton to his office.  He closed the door behind
himself, turned, and looked Chatterton in the eye.

"I don't like you," Dudley said.  "I don't like divers who touch things
on shipwrecks."

Chatterton knew what was unfolding.  Some scholars despised divers for
their willingness to disturb shipwreck artifacts.  Chatterton had
resolved this with himself long ago.  If he were to discover, say, a
Viking ship from a thousand years ago, he would surrender it to
archeologists; there are things to be learned and preserved from a
Viking ship.  But a World War II vessel about which everything is known
and meticulously documented?  Chatterton believed he was on good paper
with Allard and Cavalcante and the NHC.  He would not force the issue
with Dudley.  "Okay, that's fine," Chatterton said.

Dudley returned with Chatterton to Allard's office, where the men
thanked Chatterton for bringing "a genuine mystery" to the NHC.  Vaeth and Cavalcante then showed him to the archives, where they
introduced him to Kathleen Lloyd, an archivist and Cav-alc ante
right-hand person, who would assist Chatterton in whatever way
possible.  Chatterton thanked Allard, then disappeared with Lloyd and
Vaeth into a research area filled with active-duty military personnel,
authors, veterans, historians, and professors.  There, Lloyd told
Chatterton about four critical research tools available to him.  Each
struck Chatterton as a revelation.  They were:

1. Anti-submarine Warfare Incident Reports (ASW): A daily chronology of
underwater contact between Allied forces (ships, airplanes, blimps,
Civilian Air Patrol, armed guards aboard merchant vessels, etc.) and
enemy vessels believed to be submarines.  Reports could include
battles, chases, sightings, sonar contacts-anything related to the
hunting of U-boats.  If a report told of a battle, a more detailed
account-called an "attack report"-could be referenced.

2. Eastern Sea Frontier War Diaries (ESFWD): A daily chronology of
interesting activity or observations made by Allied personnel along the
American eastern seaboard.  Such activity could include anything from
the appearance of an oil slick to a mysterious puff of smoke to the
discovery of a life jacket.  Unlike the ASW reports, these reports did
not have to involve submarines.

3. BdU KTBs: A daily summary written by German U-boat Control (BdU)
detailing U-boat activity around the world.  These contained a U-boat's
orders, its radio communications to headquarters, and its engagements.
Only BdU KTBs written before January 16, 1945, survived the war; those
from later months were destroyed by the Germans.

4. Individual U-boat Files: Dossiers of U.S. Navy-compiled information
on specific U-boats.  These might contain files on the U-boat's type,
its orders, its patrols, intercepted communications, intelligence
reports, photographs, and survivor interrogations, as well as
biographical information on its commander.

Lloyd suggested that Chatterton begin by searching the ASW incident
reports, checking for any Allied underwater engagements in

the area of the mystery wreck site.  If he found any incidents near the
wreck site, he could request detailed files about those incidents.  He
could also check the incident's time frame against the German U-boat
diaries to see which subs had been sent to America then.  She brought
him the first boxes of reports labeled 1942.  Vaeth smiled and wished
him luck.

"I'm going to look at every piece of paper in this place if I have to,"
Chatterton said.

With that, Chatterton sat down and opened the first box of 1942 ASW
incident reports.  He began at January 1 and skimmed the page for
latitudes and longitudes within a fifteen-mile radius of the wreck
site.

Several hours later he finished with 1942.  He had scanned more than a
thousand incidents.  None of them had occurred within a fifteen-mile
radius of where the mystery U-boat lay.  He was due home that night. He
called his wife and told her he would be staying another two days. The
next morning, he was first in line at the archives, asking for 1943.

Chatterton made his way through^ every incident report for the entire
war.  In four years, not a single Allied force had engaged a submarine
within a fifteen-mile radius of the wreck site.

Chatterton asked Lloyd if he might next inspect the Eastern Sea
Frontier War Diaries-these would yield information about anything that
might have happened in the wreck area, whether or not it dealt with
U-boats.  She presented him with another mountain range of files.  As
he'd done with the incident reports, Chatterton bulldozed through the
war years, hunting for any speck of activity near his wreck site.  Two
days later he was finished.  During the war, not a single incident-not
a piece of flotsam, a washed-up life jacket, the body of a sailor, an
oil slick, even a puff of smoke-had occurred anywhere near the wreck
site.  It was as if that section of the ocean, where several dozen
crewmen lay dead in this mystery U-boat, had vanished from existence
during the war.

Chatterton asked Lloyd if he might spend the final few hours of his
trip browsing some of the archive's other files.  Soon he was lost
behind a great wall of binders and boxes.  While others around him tore
into the masses of information, Chatterton was more feline in

their company.  He studied the labels without opening containers,
flipped through research guides to learn what lay inside, orienting
himself to the archive's myriad offerings so that he could return with
vision and with a plan.  In this way he negotiated research as he
negotiated a shipwreck, by small initial penetrations designed to set
up the later home run.  As Chatterton lifted boxes and un looped the
strings from manila envelopes, he was twelve years old again and back
in that fantastical house he had discovered after a day's hitchhiking,
surrounded on all sides by stories and the dust of history.  It was
only when Lloyd tapped his shoulder and said, "Mr.  Chatterton?  Mr.
Chatterton?  We're closing now ..."  that he realized that he had
forgotten to go home.  He thanked her for all the help over his
three-day stay and made his way to the parking lot, believing that he
could come back to this wonderful place and find his answer, that he
could learn to see into those records, which had so far denied him,
that he could do it tomorrow if only he had the time.

Two weeks later, Chatterton and Yurga landed in Germany.  The divers
bought a large bouquet of mixed flowers, then headed to the U-boat
Memorial in Moltenort, near the port city of Kiel.  Here, listed on
eighty-nine bronze plaques, were the names of the thirty thousand
U-boat crewmen killed in action in World War II, each according to the
submarine on which he died.  Freezing rain needled into their necks and
made mascara of the ink on the pages of notes they had brought along.
For three hours the men traced their fingers down plaques to the letter
H in search of Horenburg.  They could find only one-Martin Horenburg,
the Funkmeister who had perished with his crew on U-869 off Africa,
just as the experts had said.  That night, still chilled after a
scalding shower, Chatterton placed a call to Merten, the U-boat ace
with whom he had been corresponding.  He knew that Merten had recently
taken ill, but he hoped the eighty-six-year-old commander might be well
enough to receive visitors and brainstorm about the mystery wreck.  A
young person answered the phone and apologized-Herr Merten could
welcome no visitors; the once-great U-boat ace was sick and did not
wish anyone to see him in such a weakened condition.

That left Bredow's U-boat Archive in Cuxhaven-Altenbruch.  By this
time, Chatterton had come to understand more about this unusual private
repository.  A U-boat veteran, Bredow had converted his own home into
the archive, cramming files, photos, records, mementos, artifacts, and
dossiers next to his kitchen and beside his appliances.  Only a massive
anchor in his yard distinguished Bredow's from the other homes on the
block.  The operation had come to be viewed by the German government
and by historians as the country's premier U-boat archive, especially
for information about the men who'd fought the war.  Bredow possessed
one-of-a-kind items, including letters, diaries, and photographs.  His
was a living museum focused on the men.  When serious researchers
looked to solve mysteries, it was to Bredow that Germany often referred
them.

Chatterton and Yurga rang the doorbell as the clock struck 9:00 A.M. A
short, balding, bespectacled sixty-eight-year-old man with a white
beard opened the door and said in a heavy German accent, "Ah!  Herr
Chatterton and Herr Yurga-welcome to the U-boat Archive.  I am Horst
Bredow."  Above Bredow's shoulder were file cabinets standing sentry
over the house, artifacts laid on felt in glass cases, and dozens of
framed photographs of U-boat crewmen in more hopeful days.  As the
divers stepped inside, they could barely remove their coats for their
nerves-they believed themselves moments from the answer to their
mystery.

"Everything you see here I have built from a single piece of paper!"
Bredow exclaimed, spreading his arms.  "All the answers you are seeking
are here.  You need go no other place."

Chatterton inhaled deeply.  Bredow was about to identify the wreck.

"But first, before I give you the answer, I shall show you the
archives," Bredow said.

Chatterton nearly burst from his skin.  Instead, he and Yurga managed
to say, "Oh, that sounds ... wonderful."

For the next ninety minutes, Bredow took the divers through every room
in the house.  For ninety minutes, the divers continued to say, "Oh,
very nice," and "Oh, how interesting," fighting to stay in their shoes
while Bredow rambled on, in no hurry to present the solution.

Finally, Bredow sat behind a desk and asked the divers to sit across
from him.  He took a narrow, typewritten scrap of paper from inside a
drawer.  Chatterton's heart raced.  Bredow pushed the paper across the
table, facedown.

"Here is your answer," Bredow said.

Chatterton's hands shook as he received it.  He turned over the paper.
On it, Bredow had typed the names of seven U-boats.

Chatterton went numb.  Yurga could not move.  This was a list of
U-boats lost off the American East Coast-a list available in public
library books.  One of the U-boats listed was a Type VII and therefore
could not be the mystery sub.  Others had been sunk several hundred
miles from the wreck site.  Still others had yielded survivors or other
ironclad evidence of their identity.  One, U-853, off Rhode Island,
had been dived for years.  These were the U-boats the divers had
eliminated first.

Chatterton took a deep breath.  "There are problems with all these
boats, sir," he said.  "It cannot be any of these."

"It must be one of those boats," Bredow said.  "Your location must be
wrong."

"No, sir," Chatterton said.  "The location we gave you is very
accurate.  We have returned to it many times."

Bredow's forehead furrowed into narrow trenches.  His cheeks turned
red.

"You can look through my files if you like," Bredow said gruffly.  "I
do not know what else to say."

Chatterton and Yurga excused themselves to another room, out of sight
of Bredow, and put their heads in their hands.  With little left to do,
the divers began to copy crew lists of every Type IX U-boat sent to
America's eastern seaboard.  Two hours later, they had done all they
could.  They were leaving virtually empty-handed.  On the way out,
Bredow offered a bit of personal advice.  "If you can recover an escape
lung from the wreck, perhaps the owner has written his name on it.  We
used to do this quite often.

Chatterton thanked Bredow for the tip and wished him a good day.  In
the hotel lobby that night, Chatterton bought a postcard and addressed
it to Kohler.  On it, he wrote, "We know more than they do.  We must go
back to the wreck."  Kohler received it a few days later.  He showed it
to his wife.

"This postcard really means a lot to me," he told her.  "It was a very
personal thing to do, not typical for Chatterton's personality.  I
think we're going to be working together for a long time.  I think
we're becoming a team."

After Chatterton returned to the States, he phoned Yurga and Kohler and
called a meeting at his house.  It was time to take matters into their
own hands.

It took Kohler all of eight minutes to reach Chatterton's place.  The
two had lived five miles from each other for years and had never known
it.  In Chatterton's living room, he and Yurga briefed Kohler on the
Germany trip, each competing to do the best impression of Bredow's
confounded expression when told that his list did not solve the
mystery.

"I gotta say, this is a mystery like you read in a book," Kohler said.
"A German U-boat comes to our doorstep in New Jersey.  It explodes and
sinks with maybe sixty guys onboard, and no one-no government or navy
or professor or historian-has a clue that it's even here."

Chatterton recounted his research in D.C. "I went through the entire
war, page by page," he said.  "My glasses were sideways on my face. The
room started spinning.  Not a single thing happened anywhere near our
wreck site during the entire war.  Nothing."

A pizza and a six-pack of Cokes arrived.  Kohler paid and forgot to ask
for change.  No one risked reaching for plates for fear of interrupting
the flow.  The divers were grooving now.

"I think we all know from our research that the stuff you hear about
U-boats coming up on the beaches and the crewmen attending costume
balls and buying bread at the local market are bullshit fantasy,"
Kohler said, pacing the room and using his triangular pepperoni slice
like a professor's pointer.  "But I'm going to confess something.  You
know the stories and rumors you read about how the Nazis tried to
smuggle gold out of Germany at the end of the war?  Or even the stories
about how Hitler fled in a U-boat as Berlin fell?  Well, think about
it.  If our U-boat was used for something like that, there sure as hell
wouldn't be any record of it, would there?"

"Whoa!  Whoa!  Whoa!"  Chatterton and Yurga called out from the couch.
"Are you saying Hitler might be on our U-boat?"

"I'm not saying anything definitive," Kohler replied.  "What I am
saying is that we need to expand our thinking.  We need to start
conceiving of scenarios that might explain why no one in the world has
a clue that this U-boat and these dead crewmen are in New Jersey.  If
we don't consider every possibility, even ones that sound outrageous,
the answer might slip right past us.  Because I gotta tell you fellas,
this mystery is already pretty damned outrageous."

For a moment no one spoke.  Kohler's eyebrows twitched at the corners
with possibility-he was ready to see this thing through no matter what.
Chatterton, who had returned from Germany deflated, basked in the
innocence and single-mindedness of Kohler's resolve.  Kohler stood his
ground and kept his eyes locked on Chatterton nodding ever so
slightly, as if to say, "We can do this."  Chatterton found himself
nodding back.  He had last seen this kind of spirit in Vietnam, a place
where a person could run through bullets for no other reason than that
it was the right thing to do.

"Okay, it's about scenarios," Chatterton said, getting up from the
couch and allowing Kohler the seat he had vacated.  "I propose we start
painting them."

Chatterton reminded the divers that two theories remained strong.
First, that the U-boat had been sunk by the Civil Air Patrol on July
11, 1942.  Second, that the wreck was U-851, the submarine Merten
believed his maverick friend had taken to New York in violation of
orders.  Chatterton laid out his plan.  Two months remained until dive
season began.  The divers would use that time to return to D.C. and
research these two theories.

Near ten P.M."  the divers called it quits.  As they were pulling on
their jackets at the door, someone said, "Do you think there really
might be gold on board?"  Another said, "Can you imagine if Hitler is
aboard?"  The third said, "Heck, at this point, I wonder if the Weekly
World News was right-maybe our U-boat sailed in a time warp from
Germany."  Everyone laughed at that one.  Then Chatterton said,
"Whatever the answer is, it's going to be amazing."  No one laughed
this time because they all knew that it was true.

A few days after the caucus at his house, Chatterton returned to the
NHC in Washington.  On his first visit, he had searched the historical
records for any activity that might have occurred within a fifteen-mile
radius of the wreck site.  He had come up empty.  This time, he would
expand that search to a thirty-mile radius, then to a sixty-mile radius
if necessary.  The research lasted four days.

He found nothing.  Not a single event or observation had been recorded
within sixty miles of the wreck site.

On his next trip, made with Yurga, Chatterton focused on U-851, the
boat Merten believed his colleague Weingartner had commandeered to New
Jersey in an effort to more actively hunt enemy ships.  Chatterton
shared Merten's theory with Cavalcante, the head of the archives, who
took an immediate interest in the idea and began his own bit of
research.

While Chatterton waited for Cavalcante's findings, he turned his
attention to the Civil Air Patrol theory.  He posited a basic question:
Had Germany sent any U-boats to the American East Coast during early
July 1942, when the CAP claimed to have sunk one off New Jersey?  The
answer would lie in the BdU KTBs, the diaries kept by German U-boat
headquarters.  Chatterton requested those diaries from the research
room.

Bingo.  Several U-boats, it turned out, had been hunting in American
waters then.  According to the diaries, all but two of those
U-boats-U'157 and U-158-had returned safely to Germany.  Both U-157
and U-158 were Type IXs, just like the U-boat the divers had found.
Chatterton requested the attack reports associated with the sinkings of
U-157 and U-158.

According to the navy, U-157 had been sunk northeast of Havana on June
13, 1942, by a U.S. Coast Guard cutter, killing all fifty-two men on
board.  The incident had happened nearly two thousand miles from the
divers' wreck site.  The attack report was ironclad- there were several
witnesses, and debris had been recovered from the wreck, indicating
that the sub sank where it was attacked.  Chatterton therefore
determined it impossible that U-157 was the mystery U-boat.  He next
checked the attack report for U-158.  That

proved more interesting.  On June 30, 1942, an American amphibious
airplane spotted U-158 off Bermuda, with perhaps fifteen of its crew
sun tanning on deck.  As the submarine crash-dived, the pilot dropped
two depth charges, one of which lodged inside the U-boat's conning
tower-a nearly impossible bull's-eye.  As the U-boat submerged, the
bomb detonated and, according to the report, destroyed the submarine,
killing all fifty-four men on board.  According to the attack report,
there was just one witness-the attacking airplane- and no debris had
been spotted or recovered.  That left room for the possibility that
U-158 had not been sunk where it had been attacked.  The archive was
closing for the weekend.  Chatterton copied the documents and placed
them in a manila envelope marked RICHIE.  Kohler would be the perfect
man to investigate the last days of U-158.

Chatterton and Yurga had been in Washington for three days.  As they
were packing to return to New Jersey, Cavalcante stopped by the
research room and dropped a bombshell.

"As you know, I've been doing some research on U-851, the one that
belonged to Merten's friend," Cavalcante said.  "During the war, our
spy network in Germany produced some very precise intelligence on what
that U-boat had in cargo."

The divers held their breath.  Just days ago they had speculated about
hidden gold stored aboard U-boats.

"Turns out U-851 was loaded with many tons of mercury to be delivered
to Japan," Cavalcante said.  "They did a cost analysis at the time.  At
1945 prices, that mercury was worth several million dollars."

Chatterton and Yurga nearly collapsed.  They were both commercial
divers.  They began envisioning plans to pump the mercury from the
wreck.  They thanked Cavalcante and practically sprinted to their car.
Before Chatterton could put the key in the ignition both divers
exclaimed, "We're rich!"  During the drive home, they formulated a
plan.  Yurga would research the current price of mercury.  Chatterton
would contact an attorney to work out the legalities of salvage.  They
discussed the challenges of being new millionaires.  Hours later, they
looked up and saw a sign welcoming them to Pennsylvania.  Their new
status as tycoons had caused them to miss the exit for New Jersey.

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.

Armed with the attack report for the sinking of U-158, Kohler set out
for Washington to do his own research.  Rather than duplicate
Chatterton's work at the NHC, Kohler went instead to the National
Archives and Records Administration, storehouse for the Declaration of
Independence, the Constitution, and the majority of America's most
important records, including many naval documents.  He had learned that
many of the captured German records resided with the N.A."  and he
hungered to examine whatever information had survived about this U-boat
and its commander.

At the sign-in desks, in various research rooms, Kohler recognized the
names of several authors and historians whose work he had admired since
childhood-unbelievable for a Brooklyn kid who'd never spent a day in
college.  He requested information on U-158.  Staff members brought
stacks of files and boxes of microfilm, and asked that Kohler wear
white gloves while inspecting photographs.  Much of the information was
in German, causing Kohler to tap other researchers on the shoulder to
ask, "Does this word mean 'machine gun'?"  to which they might reply,
"No, that word means 'parakeet."" He kept at it, copying reconstructed
logs from U-158's doomed mission and diaries from its earlier patrols
in hopes of seeing into the mind of Erwin Rostin, its commander.  On
the way out, he was forced to wait while officials stamped his research
DECLASSIFIED-a touch of cloak-and-dagger that made Kohler think, "I'm
back in the game."

A few nights later, Kohler called a meeting for Chatterton's house.
With Chatterton and Yurga settled on the couch, he proceeded to weave a
singular tale from his research.  On June 30, 1942, as they knew, an
American amphibious airplane patrolling off Bermuda had dropped a depth
charge directly into the conning tower of U-158.  According to the
pilot, when the U-boat dove to escape, the bomb detonated and sank the
submarine, killing everyone aboard.

"But what if," Kohler asked, whirling on his heels, "U-158 is only

injured?  Or she escaped damage completely?  Let's say her conning
tower is damaged but she still is able to move.  What would she do?"

"She'd try to make it back to Germany," Yurga said.

"Exactly," Kohler agreed.  "Especially since she was at the end of her
patrol and out of torpedoes.  But in this case, she has an even better
option.  My research says she was scheduled to rendezvous with a 'milk
cow'-one of those resupply U-boats-in the open Atlantic.  So you'd
expect U-158 to head northeast to the milk cow for fuel and supplies,
right?"

"Right," Chatterton said.

"Are you ready for this?"  Kohler asked.  "I say she never headed for
Germany or for the milk cow.  I say Commander Rostin thought to
himself, "I'm within striking range of New York City.  I'm going to New
York to sink American ships with my deck gun."  So he takes the U-boat
north toward New York.  He gets as far as New Jersey when the Civil Air
Patrol spots him and lets him have it.  Now U-158 is really wounded.
She hobbles a few dozen miles before the conning tower finally
separates and she sinks-right at our wreck site.  The Civil Air Patrol
never gets credit because the first airplane claimed the kill."

"Hold everything," Chatterton said.  "What commander in his right mind
is going to take an injured U-boat without torpedoes and head north to
New York when he has the chance for repair or escape to the east?"

"I'm going to tell you about that commander," Kohler said.  "I've
learned a lot about him.  His name was Erwin Rostin.  A few months
before this, on his first war patrol, he sank four ships.  On this
patrol, the guy sank thirteen ships.  No U-boat commander in history
had a deadlier two-patrol total.  This guy Rostin, he's a certified
bounty hunter.  He's killing Allied ships like it's target practice. He
machine-gunned a Spanish vessel and took the captain prisoner!  I've
read about the great U-boat commanders, how they never gave up, how
this generation was all piss and vinegar.  Rostin is so unstoppable
they award him the Knight's Cross by radio while the U-boat is still at
sea!  Rostin is not limping home, no way.  He's only a thousand miles
from New York.  He's still got enemies to kill."

Chatterton and Yurga argued against Kohler's scenario.  They insisted
that a commander so low on fuel would never risk his ship and his men
to fire his deck gun at enemy ships.  They called him Tom Clancy for
suggesting that this U-boat had been injured twice before finally dying
at the mystery wreck site.  Kohler never wavered.  He asked them to
imagine a time in which the world considered U-boats invincible.  He
asked them to envision an era in which U-boat commanders were the
subjects of legend-making books, stories, radio programs, memoirs,
newsreels, and parades.  Chatterton did not necessarily agree with
Kohler's scenario, but he found himself swept up in the man's
enthusiasm, and as he watched Kohler wave his arms and clench his
fists, it occurred to him that Kohler's overarching instinct was
dead-on, that if one did not accept written history as gospel, worlds
of possibility opened.

It was Chatterton's turn to speak.  He acknowledged that Kohler had
made an intriguing case for the wreck being U-158 and for the Civil
Air Patrol dealing the death blow.  Now it was time for him to make the
case for the wreck being U-851, the boat commanded by Merten's
colleague Weingartner.

"Merten knows his man," Chatterton said.  "He knows the guy still was a
hunter in his heart.  Richie, you talked about the importance of
knowing the man.  Well, we are personally being told by one of the
great U-boat aces that he knows the man-and he is convinced that the
man came to New York.  That's why there's no record of U-851 in our
wreck area-the boat was ordered to the Indian Ocean.  Weingartner
disobeyed the orders.  When he disappears, Germany presumes he sank
where they'd sent him."

"I don't believe it," Kohler shot back.  "No commander is going to go
against orders like that.  They'd be shot for that.  Taking a U-boat to
New York when you're ordered to the Indian Ocean?  It's too egregious.
I've read about a lot of U-boat commanders.  I never heard of one who'd
disobey like that."

Now it was Yurga's turn.  He specialized in the technical end.  That's
what he delivered.

"We've got two favorites," Yurga said.  "Richie likes U-158.  John
likes U-851.  It sure looks like it's gotta be one or the other.  I
know how to settle it.  According to my research, U-158 was built with
a deck gun.  But some Type IXs were not.  Next time we hit the water,

we look for evidence of a deck gun.  If our U-boat was built without
one, it can't be U-158.  Period.

"Now, as to U-851.  It was a Type IXD, a special model they called a
U-cruiser.  U-cruisers were about thirty feet longer than typical Type
IXs.  All we need to do is drag a tape measure across the wreck.  If
it's two hundred and eighty-seven feet, it's a U-cruiser.  If it's
shorter, it ain't U-851.  Next time we splash, we do a little looking,
a little measuring, and we'll know where we stand with both these
theories."

The divers shook hands and called it a night.  Later that evening, at
around midnight, Kohler tiptoed out of bed and into his kitchen.  He
found Chatterton's phone number stuck to the refrigerator door.  It was
too late to call.  He dialed anyway.

"John, it's Richie.  Listen, man, I'm sorry for calling so late ...
When I was at National Archives, I came across some photos."

Kohler described the pictures he had seen: of a U-boat man's arm lying
on the deck of an American ship-just his arm-with his tattoo still
clear as day on his biceps; of a smiling British seaman holding a
bucket of guts with a caption that said something like, "10 feet of
human intestines; one human lung recovered from debris of sunken
U-boat"; of a human liver next to a chocolate tin from a German mess
kit.  He told Chatterton he had been reading about U-boats for a long
time and that for some reason, he'd had this pretty little picture
about how a submarine sinks-that it cracks, starts dropping, the
crewmen scratch once or twice, and then everyone drowns quietly.  Now
he told Chatterton that he knew better.  He said these pictures got him
thinking about the guys on their U-boat, and he asked Chatterton what
he thought the sailors were thinking in the thirty seconds before their
world blew up.

Chatterton told Kohler he'd been seeing the same kinds of photos.  He
described one that showed thirty U-boat crewmen in a life raft reaching
their arms out to the enemy ship that had just rammed them.  He told of
snapshots showing the horrific damage done to U-boats by depth charges.
The worst part, he told Kohler, was that a lot of these photos were
from late in the war, when these sailors had gone out in their
submarines knowing they had almost no

chance of returning home.  He told Kohler he could not imagine what a
man might be thinking then.

For a few moments there was only silence on the line.  Then Kohler
apologized for calling so late, and Chatterton told him that the call
was no problem at all.

CHAPTER NINE

"A HEAVY TOLL

The SEASON'S first TRIP to the U-boat was scheduled for May 24, 1992.
By now, the divers had taken to calling the wreck U-Who, but no one
expected the mystery to last much longer.  Especially Chatterton.  In
the off-season, between research trips to Washington, he had gone and
messed with voodoo.

For decades, scuba divers had breathed good old-fashioned air from
their tanks.  In recent months, however, a group of cutting-edge
warm-water divers had ditched air in favor of a mixture of oxygen,
helium, and nitrogen known as tri mix  These divers had not invented
tri mix rather, they had taken military and commercial diving
technology and then tinkered with it to suit their purposes.  As
Chatterton heard it, tri mix 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

Chatterton believed that any one of these benefits could revolutionize
wreck diving in the Northeast.  Together they could turn a wreck diver
into a superhero.  Imagine working the U-boat without the pounding,
narrowing fear of narcosis-and being able to do it longer, better, and
safer than ever.  When a Florida diver offered a tri mix workshop in
New Jersey, Chatterton and Yurga rushed to sign up.

Kohler, however, stayed away.  He, too, had heard about tri mix  He
believed that if something sounded too good to be true, it was.  "This
is witchcraft, it's black magic," he told Chatterton.  "You're going to
'experiment' at two hundred and thirty feet?  Inside a U-boat?  No one
knows the effects of that gas on the brain or the body.  You're going
to get bent.  Or paralyzed.  Or killed."

Chatterton and Yurga attended anyway.  The workshop was taught by Billy
Deans, a Florida dive shop owner.  For a fee of one hundred dollars,
attendees received a loose-leaf binder with photocopied articles and
tables.  The principle behind using tri mix-known as technical
diving-struck Chatterton as sound.  By replacing some nitrogen with
helium, a diver couLd diminish his risk of nitrogen buildup-the culprit
for so much of what goes wrong in air dives.  The benefits were said to
be quantum leaps in safety and productivity.

But there were potential downsides.  First, there were no technical
diving classes or certification agencies; a diver experimenting with
this new art was on his own.  Second, divers could make just one dive
per day, not two as was customary, because the intricacies of
off-gassing helium while topside were not fully understood.  Third,
because divers breathed a separate gas, called "nitrox," during
decompression, they had to add nitrox tanks to their rigs, thereby
carrying more gear.  Fourth, northeastern dive shops did not stock tri
mix if a diver wanted the stuff, he had to mix it himself. Finally,
there existed almost no dive tables to instruct a technical diver on
how long to decompress; this, too, would be a matter of improvisation
and experimentation.

When the workshop ended, Deans told Chatterton and Yurga, "If you guys
go forward, you'll be practically the only ones in your part of the country doing it.  We don't know exactly how this works in cold
water.  You'll have to be pioneers."

By now, Chatterton was willing to pioneer.  He believed he was just a
dive or two from pulling evidence of the U-Who's identity from the
wreck.  He believed in his ongoing responsibility to the crewmen's
families and to history.  He believed in looking beyond, and technical
diving seemed the first true beyond since Cousteau.

Kohler feared for his friends' lives.  He begged them to reconsider-so
much productive diving had already been done on the wreck, why risk it?
He warned Chatterton that mixing such flammable gases under such high
pressures could result in disaster-a single spark could cause an
explosion or fire.  Chatterton could only say, "When it comes to the
U-boat, Richie, tri mix is the future."

In February, as the divers steadied themselves for the business of
brewing their own tri mix word arrived from the Coast Guard: a fishing
boat about a hundred miles off Atlantic City had pulled up a human body
dressed in a diver's dry suit and scuba tanks.  The corpse's face had
been eaten away by scavengers, leaving just a brown, waxy substance
over the skull.  Five teeth remained attached to a dislocated lower
jaw.  The Coast Guard identified the corpse as Steve Feldman.  His body
had been recovered perhaps five miles from the U-boat.  He had been
missing since September.

In January 1992, Chatterton and Yurga set out to mix their own gas.
They rented five-foot-tall bottles of helium and oxygen from the local
industrial gas supplier and purchased high-pressure hoses, delicate
connectors, and finely tooled pressure gauges.  They would mix the gas
in Chatterton's garage.  To give himself a chance at survival in case
of an explosion, Chatterton would stand outside the garage and reach
his left hand through the window to manipulate the valves.  "I'm a
righty," he explained to Yurga.  "If this thing blows, it's better that
I lose my left hand."

For weeks, Chatterton mixed gases in his garage, reaching his left hand
through the window, holding his breath, waiting for an explosion. Soon,
he and Yurga were expert at preparing the mixture of 17 percent oxygen,
30 percent helium, and 53 percent nitrogen they hoped would
revolutionize their diving.  They purchased dive tables from an
engineer who wrote them as a hobby-he was one of maybe

three people in the country who even attempted it-then used imagination
and daring to extrapolate those tables so that they might make two
dives in a single day.  They purchased new and larger scuba tanks. When
the weather warmed, they took the new rigs with their newfangled gas
and splashed in a Pennsylvania quarry, adjusting buoyancy, tweaking
rigging, and learning to breathe the magic gas.  In the quarry's
shallows, their minds remained crystal clear, their coordination
precise.  The bottom of the Atlantic, however, would be another matter.
And the inside of a sunken U-boat another matter still.

On the evening of May 23, 1992, divers gathered at the Seeker for the
season's first trip to the U-Who.  Backs were slapped, new gear
inspected, off-season stories swapped.  Everyone asked tri mix
questions of Chatterton and Yurga.  They always answered the same way:
"Yes, I think we'll live."  Kohler was among the last to show.  Next to
Chatterton's new rig, Kohler looked as if he'd stolen his gear from the
1958 set of the television show^ ca Hunt.  On his back were the skull
and crossbones of the Atlantic Wreck Divers*.

"You're a dinosaur, Kohler!"  Chatterton yelled from the boat. "Maybe,"
Kohler shot back, taking in the sight of Chatterton's new gas, "but I
ain't heading toward extinction."

A few minutes later, Nagle emerged.  Few had seen the Seeker's owner
since the end of last season, when he had vowed to quit drinking and
work himself into diving shape.  It took a moment for the divers to
process the sight.  Nagle's skin was spotted with jaundice, his hair
greasy, his body like a rumpled suit on a wire hanger.  He smelled bad.
He had brought along no dive gear.  People scurried to avoid staring.

The rumble of the Seeker's diesels was comfort to these divers, who
never slept quite as well at home as they did on these thin, stained
blue pads that delivered them to where they belonged.  In the
wheelhouse, Nagle and Chatterton took turns steering.  Chatterton
updated Nagle on the two favorites-U-158 and U-851and how Crowell and
Yurga planned to measure the wreck and search for evidence of a deck
gun, two simple tests that would pronounce on these original theories. 
Nagle stared straight ahead, the liquor spots on his face lit red by
the instruments.  For several minutes he said nothing.

"The Seeker is bigger than me," Nagle said finally.  "Diving is bigger
than me.  The Seeker will go on long after I'm gone."

Chatterton said nothing.  Ocean mist spattered the windshield.  Nagle
continued to steer a course for the U-Who, the greatest shipwreck a
diver could ever find.

The divers awoke the next morning to a glorious day.  The sun shone and
the ocean was glass.  Bottom visibility, they speculated, would be one
hundred feet at least.  Chatterton and Kohler began dressing.  They had
decided weeks ago to dive together and now rehearsed their plans.
According to Chatterton's research, torpedo-tube hatches-the circular
doors that swung closed after a torpedo had been loaded into its firing
chamber-contained on their faces a tag bearing the U-boat's number.  On
his first dive, Chatterton would slither through the sub and into the
forward torpedo room, videotaping his navigation for study topside.  On
the second dive, he would return, penetrate to the end of the torpedo
room, and remove the tags from the hatches.  With any luck, the tags
would reveal the wreck's identity.  The plan was classic Chatterton:
tape, study, and return.  For his part, Kohler planned to explore the
stern, searching the aft torpedo room for torpedo-hatch tags and any
other useful artifacts.  Measuring the wreck would be left to Danny
Crowell.  Yurga would search for evidence of a deck gun.  By day's end,
mysteries would be solved.

Chatterton and Kohler splashed just after sunrise.  Neither had seen
the Atlantic so still and limpid, as if the ocean had dressed for this
promising day.  Chatterton's tri mix flowed into his lungs and brain as
theory had promised, keeping his thinking sharp and the enemy narcosis
at bay.  At 100 feet, in this miraculous visibility, they could see the
submarine end to end.  But for the mortal wound to its side it looked
ready for war, an eel of steel, torpedoes, and guns, still stealthy and
deadly.  Before this, Chatterton and Kohler had seen only twenty-foot
patches of the wreck in the swirling ocean.  Now they saw a war
machine.  The divers descended farther.  At 150 feet, the cataclysm of
the U-boat's final moments screamed from the gaping hole in the control
room.  Only now, in such pristine visibility, could the full extent of
the violence done to this U-boat be digested. Chatterton and Kohler
looked at each other.  Each mouthed the words "Oh, Christ."

The divers continued to the wreck and secured the grapple.  Chatterton
remained astounded at his clarity of vision and nimbleness of hand. He
felt no narcosis.  Kohler watched him for signs of delirium or other
symptoms that might occur when one dabbles in the black arts.
Chatterton smiled and gave him the okay.  The divers went their
separate ways.

Chatterton made his way into the control room, through the commander's
quarters, and into the noncommissioned officers' quarters.  Again he
saw piles of human remains-skulls, femurs, ribs, shins.  This time,
after a winter's research, he felt a connection to the bones, as if he
were returning to the home of a family he had known.  He had read
crewmen's letters and had seen their faces in photographs as they
drowned on sinking lifeboats.  For the first time, Chatterton felt as
if the men might not mind his efforts to find their names.  ^

Chatterton corkscrewed himself through the obstructions, dodging
hanging wire and jagged metal until he arrived at the forward torpedo
room.  Breathing tri mix he felt invincible and was tempted to push
through and go right for the identifying tags he believed were attached
to the torpedo tubes.  But he stuck to his plan and videotaped the
inside of the room, knowing that the camera would catch navigational
traps worthy of topside study.  After a few minutes of filming, he
turned back, made his way out of the wreck, and ascended to the
surface.

At the stern, Kohler worked into the aft torpedo room and began to
search for artifacts.  As before in this place, he saw a femur, then a
skull and several other bones.  Last year, the sight of these remains
had thrown a cold chill through Kohler.  This year, after he'd burrowed
into the lives of the U-boat men, the room began pulsing.  As Kohler
looked at the skull and bones he could envision the checked bedsheets
on which the sailors had slept, and he could hear the singing of their
songs.

Kohler spent twenty minutes searching for clues but found nothing. 
Back on board the Seeker, he and Chatterton compared notes.  Each had
been in the water for about ninety minutes.  Chatterton's tri mix
however, had enabled him to stay on the wreck for thirty minutes, while
Kohler had stayed only twenty-two before needing to decompress.

"It was like diving in the Caribbean, Richie," Chatterton said.  "Clear
head.  Sharp motor skills.  No narcosis."

"I'll stick with the stuff that got me here, thank you," Kohler
replied.

By this time, Crowell was preparing to splash and measure the wreck,
and Yurga was dressed and ready to dive for evidence of a deck gun.
Yurga had brought along a customer from the dive shop where he worked,
a personable emergency-room physician named Lew Kohl, who had also
outfitted himself to breathe tri mix  "You sure about him?"  Chatterton
whispered to Yurga.  "He's used tri mix on some shallower dives this
year.  He says he's ready.  And I'll be diving with him," Yurga
replied.

Kohl adjusted his mask, bit down on his regulator, and flopped sideways
off the gunwale.  Chatterton and Kohler could not believe what happened
next.  Rather than bob to the surface as most divers do after the
splash, 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 tri mix 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.

"Oh, shit, he's gone," Kohler said.  "Lew Kohl's dead."  But Chatterton
could see that Kohl had landed and was still breathing-he could see his
bubbles.  Chatterton's mind slowed to 16 rpm, the speed of the Vietnam
medic under pressure.

"Look at his bubbles.  He's wandering around looking for the wreck,
which means he's alive," Chatterton said.  "Yurga, I'm going to give
you a line.  Follow his bubbles and go get him."

"John, this is too dangerous," Yurga said.  "This is my first tri mix
dive and-"

"I'm going to give you a line that I'll have with me up here at all
times.  Richie and I cannot get back in the water now.  You must go in
the water, follow his bubbles, and get him."

Yurga splashed.  As he spiraled downward around Kohl's bubbles, Kohl
managed to drop his weight belt.  Now positively buoyant, he began to
ascend.  At 150 feet, however, he ran out of gas-nothing was coming
from his regulator.  At that point, he lost interest in proper dive
protocol.  Kohl decided to rocket toward sunshine.  Seconds later he
broke the surface.

"Now he's a Polaris missile!"  Kohler shouted.  "He's gonna be bent for
sure if he lives."

Kohl began flailing and thrashing on the surface.  But he was not
vomiting or trembling, evidence to Chatterton that he had not yet been
seriously bent.

"He's only been in the water maybe ten minutes," Chatterton yelled.
"He's got a chance."

Kohl was not able to swim.  Tom Packer and Steve Gatto dived into the
ocean, dragged him up the ladder, and put him on the dressing table.
"Get me a stethoscope and the crash kit," Chatterton ordered.  Kohler
cut off Kohl's dry suit.  Chatterton took Kohl's vital signs and began
recording dive and medical information doctors would later need.  As he
made notes, he asked flatly, "Lew, are you in pain?  Lew, can you hear
me?"

Kohl could not respond.  Chatterton told Nagle to call the Coast Guard
rescue chopper.  He shoved aspirins down Kohl's throat, forced him to
drink massive amounts of water to reduce the gas volume in his blood,
and put an oxygen mask over his face.  He used the stethoscope to
listen for the gurgling of an embolism in Kohl's blood vessels.  A
minute later, Kohl began to come around, almost as if he had been
reanimated in a mad doctor's laboratory.

"Lew, we're calling a helicopter for you," Chatterton said.  "Oh, no,
don't do that," Kohl replied.  "I'm fine.  I'm coming around.  I'm not
even symptomatic-"

"You're fine for the moment," Chatterton said.  "But we're treading
water here with this aspirin and oxygen.  You're going to become

bent.  You can't do what you did without problems.  We gotta get you to
a hospital."

Chatterton shined a flashlight into Kohl's eyes.

"I see no signs of neurological damage," Chatterton said.  "But you're
gonna be bent.  It's just a matter of time."

The divers continued to comfort Kohl and keep him stable on oxygen and
water.  With each minute, Kohl seemed better and healthier.  Several
minutes passed.  Nagle poked his head from the wheelhouse and announced
that a Coast Guard chopper was en route.

"Ah, jeez, I'm really sorry, guys," Kohl said.  "Everyone's trip is on
me.  I pick up the tab for everyone."

Chatterton smiled and allowed another diver to stay with Kohl for a
while.  He then moved to the back of the Seeker to help Yurga climb
aboard.  Still about two hundred feet from the stern of the boat, Yurga
waved to Chatterton.  Chatterton began to wave back, but his arm froze.
Stalking Yurga from behind was an eighteen-foot monster.

"Shark!"  Chatterton yelled.  "Yurga!  Behind you!  Shark!"

Yurga whirled around just as the shark submerged.

"What?"  Yurga yelled.  "I don't see anything!"

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!"

Now, even as the shark bore down, Chatterton could not help laughing.

"Swim, Charlie, swim!"  he screamed, quoting a line from the movie
jaws.

Yurga swam.  The shark followed.  Yurga swam with all he had.  The
shark finally turned away and disappeared.

Nagle cut the anchor line and headed to meet the Coast Guard
helicopter.  Kohl continued to improve.  The chopper took him away.  He
would suffer joint pain as a result of the bends but would recover
fully.  Most likely, only his relatively brief time on the ocean bottom
saved him; had he stayed down longer and then shot to the surface
without decompressing, his adventure as a dirt dart probably would have
killed him.  The divers, however, had lost the most perfect day any of
them had ever seen.  Crowell had never had a chance to measure the
wreck.  Yurga hadn't checked for a deck gun.  And Chatterton hadn't
gone inside the torpedo room to get his tags.  The season, however, was
young.  That was another thing about wreck diving. So long as you were
alive, there would always be another trip.

Nagle booked the next U-Who trip for June 9, 1992.  Dr.  Kohl had seen
enough of the U-boat for one lifetime.  He was replaced by two divers
unlike any Chatterton and Kohler had known before.

Chris Rouse, thirty-nine, and Chrissy Rouse, twenty-two, were father
and son, though with their identical wiry builds and Mediterranean
features, the men were often mistaken for brothers.  Smiling, they
almost appeared to be twins, their pupils turning leprechaun under dark
eyebrow forests of naughtiness.  They smiled a lot.  They argued even
more.

The Rouses bickered incessantly, flinging insults, epithets, and
crudities at the slightest provocation-and preferably no provocation-no
matter the place or occasion.

"The best part of you was the stain I left on the mattress," Chris
would say in front of a boat full of divers.

"You old fucking man, you can't keep up with me," Chrissy would
reply.

"You're lucky you got my good looks or you wouldn't get anywhere with
women," Chris would say.

"Ah, you just got lucky with Mom, you old douche," Chrissy would
answer.

And on and on, until the Rouses came to be known as the Bickers.  Some
divers were horrified by the exchanges.  Many more were entertained.
Chatterton and Kohler watched in amazement.

Yet the Rouses were excellent divers.  They had made their bones as
cave divers, a branch of scuba known for its meticulous and unrelenting
safety training.  Cavers often shunned wreck diving because of its
unpredictability and harsh conditions, but the Rouses were drawn to
wrecks for the history to be uncovered and the artifacts to be taken. 
Cavers who challenged shipwrecks often did so stubbornly, refusing to
warehouse their long-held mantras and techniques.  The Rouses had no
such issues.  They were ravenous in seeking new skills and burned to
apply them.  Like many cavers, they had experience with technical
diving and breathing tri mix and were eager to discuss theory and
ideas.

When the Rouses hit water it was clear they were blood.  They dove as a
team and had developed a sixth sense between them, the kind of
anticipation born of a lifetime of living under the same roof.
Underwater they remained absolutely loyal, each willing to sacrifice
himself for the good of the other.  This single-mindedness-this
love-made the Rouses perhaps the most formidable team in diving.  When
Nagle invited the Rouses to join the U-Who expedition, Chrissy vowed to
solve the mystery.  He told Chatterton that by identifying the wreck he
would immortalize the Rouse name and contribute a page of history to
the world.  His father did not bicker with him about this.

"They're more than talented and capable enough to do it," Chatterton
told Kohler.  "They may be the ones who get this done."

The weather for the June trip was not nearly as perfect as it had been
in May, but the divers' plans remained the same.  Chatterton would
search the forward torpedo tubes for numbered tags.  Kohler would hunt
for identifying artifacts.  Crowell would measure the wreck.  Yurga
would determine if the U-Who had been built with a deck gun.  As for
the Rouses, they would penetrate the wreck and begin to learn the
U-boat.

As before, Chatterton and Kohler dove together and set the hook.  This
time, Kohler swam forward with Chatterton, his eyes scanning the areas
where crewmen kept records and personal belongings.  Chatterton moved
through the forward section of the U-boat, into the torpedo room, and
up against the torpedo-tube hatches.  Where he had once seen nothing in
this spot, he now saw a white, tag-shaped patch of encrustation on the
hatch.  He grabbed his knife and pried the blade under the
encrustation.  White flakes fell away, revealing the perfect outline of
a tag.  Except no tag remained.  Corrosion had eaten away the metal so
that only the imprint of the tag had survived.  Chatterton's heart
sank.  He inspected the other three

torpedo-tube hatches.  Same story.  A half century of salt water and
storms had gnawed away the answer.  As Chatterton turned to end his
dive he felt profoundly disappointed.  He had developed concrete
evidence for the tags' existence and had designed a well-researched
plan for their retrieval, only to find them eaten by nature.

Just behind Chatterton, Kohler was having better luck.  While in the
noncommissioned officers' quarters he discovered a closetful of boots
and shoes, still lined up neatly-left-right, left-right-just as the
crewmen had left them.  He took one of the boots, believing a crewman
might have written his name inside.  "It doesn't look like you guys
were wearing these, so I'm going to take one," he explained to the
roomful of remains around him.

Kohler moved next to the conning tower lying broken in the sand beside
the U-boat.  Inside, he discovered a bicycle-type seat.  At once, he
recognized the piece as the chair on which the commander sat while
manning the attack periscope.  "This might be where the commander
died," he told himself.  "If this U-boat was attacking when it was
sunk, this is where the guy would have been sitting."  The chair,
however, bore no identifying marks,-so Kohler left it alone.  He met
Chatterton on the anchor line.  Each man shook his head.  Neither had
solved the mystery.

While Chatterton and Kohler decompressed, Crowell and Yurga set about
their missions.  To measure the wreck, Crowell attached one end of a
surveyor's tape measure to the U-boat's bow, then swam aft, allowing
the tape to un spool from its reel as he moved.  He had affixed a tag
to the tape at the 250-foot mark before leaving on this trip, the
length of the typical Type IX.  If this U-boat was any longer than
that, it would be powerful evidence that the wreck was U-851, the rare
Type IXD U-cruiser commanded by Merten's rebel colleague Weingartner.

Crowell allowed the line to un spool slowly as he began his journey
along the wreck's top.  Line spun free of the reel.  As the tip of the
U-boat came into view, the reel hiccuped.  Crowell looked down.  His
marker had come up.  The wreck was about 250 feet long.  U-cruisers
were 287 feet long.  This could not be U-851.

While Crowell prepared to ascend, Yurga settled in just forward

of the damaged control-room area.  He had made a careful study of Type
IX deck plans and knew exactly where to look for the deck gun mount, a
known feature of U-158, the submarine commanded by the daring Erwin
Rostin.  Yurga crab-walked along the top of the wreck and envisioned
the blueprints he had devoured like pulp-fiction novels during the
off-season.  He surveyed the relevant area.  The evidence was plain as
day: this U-boat had been built without a deck gun mount.  This wreck
could not be U-158.  In the course of twenty minutes, the divers' two
leading theories had been sunk.

The men regrouped topside.  Each seemed more shell-shocked than the
next.  A winter of intense research had come to naught.  None of them
could fathom any viable contenders other than the two they had just
eliminated.  They halfheartedly inspected the inside of the boot Kohler
had recovered.  As befitting the day, it contained no information.  The
Rouses surfaced soon after.  Neither father nor son had found much of
significance.  Chatterton and Kohler made another dive but found
little.  As the boat headed back to Brielle, the divers knew that
summer was upon them, meaning that Nagle would begin running the Seeker
to the Andrea Doria, his money trips.  None of them knew when the boat
might again be available to take them to the U-Who.

The day after returning from the U-Who, Chatterton wrote a letter to
Karl-Friedrich Merten.  He explained that divers had measured the wreck
and determined that it could not be U-851, the boat Merten believed his
colleague Weingartner had commandeered to New York.  Merten wrote back
expressing gratitude for Chatterton's efforts and acceptance of his
conclusion.  Chatterton did not phone Major Gregory Weidenfeld of the
Civil Air Patrol; though the diver had ruled out U-158, they still
allowed that the wreck might have fallen to the CAP.

For the next three months, Nagle ran to the Doria, and ever when he had
an open date for the U-Who, the weather interfered] Chatterton still
could not believe that the sub's torpedo-tube hater tags, which he had
thought were made of resilient brass, had been eaten away.  He tracked
down an elderly U-boat veteran in South Carolina who had also built
U-boats in Germany's naval yards.  The man explained that as brass had
become scarce, tags had been made of leftover materials, a metal stew
that could not survive long in the marine environment.  Chatterton
thanked him for the information and began to say good-bye.

"One other thing, if I might," the old U-boat man said.  "Of course.
What is it?"  Chatterton asked.

"Thank you for what you are doing.  Thank you for caring about those
boys down there.  They don't have anyone else."

Caring for the fallen crewmen had figured into much of Chatterton's
and Kohler's thinking since the last U-Who trip.  Though neither spoke
of it, a truth had begun pounding at their awareness: they would stand
a far better chance of identifying the wreck by digging through the
human remains.  Many of the bones were still dressed in clothes, the
pockets of which might contain wallets, coins, a personalized money
clip, love letters, an engraved pocket watch, anything.  Items like
these survived for decades on shipwrecks.  Frustrated and with no
promising leads, Chatterton and Kohler fantasized about the answers
that lay mixed among these bones.

Chatterton called Kohler and set up a meeting at Scotty's Steak-house,
a popular nearby restaurant.

"You want to talk about the men, right?"  Kohler asked.  "Right,"
Chatterton said.  "It's time."

The next evening, the divers sat down for rib eyes and baked potatoes.
They discussed the prospect of digging through the crewmen's remains.
The bones appeared to be well preserved.  Personal belongings were
likely still among the bones.  The only question was how to deal with
those remains.  Each man announced his decision.  "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 discussion lasted for hours.  Their resolve
pivoted around five principles:

1. Respect for the crewmen.  The U-boat men were sailors.  They had
risked their lives to serve their country.  By doing that, they had
earned a respect that entitled them to rest undisturbed.

2. Respect for the families in Germany.  Neither diver could bring
himself to tell a crewman's family that he had solved the mystery by
rummaging through the pockets of their loved one's corpse.  Nor were
they willing to lie to a man's family and say that they had not done so
if in fact they had.

3. Honoring the brotherhood of the deep.  As submariners, the U-boat
men had embraced the risks of living below the ocean's surface.  The
divers existed in the same place, abided by the same laws, and faced
many of the same perils, all of which generated a feeling of
brotherhood and a sense of protectiveness toward the remains.

4. Protecting the image of wreck divers.  The U-Who had become
international news, Chatterton and Kohler emissaries of wreck diving.
Their behavior would reflect on the sport for years.

5. Doing the right thing.  The commitment to solve the mystery had
originated in the instinct to do right by the crewmen.  To violate
their remains in order to find an answer would defeat the dedication to
dignity with which the project had been undertaken.

Chatterton and Kohler agreed on a simple guideline.  If they saw a
piece of identification lying behind, say, a skull, they could move
that skull to retrieve the tag.  But they would not search remains for
evidence, even if they believed such a search would be productive.
Moreover, they would create an environment of peer pressure to
urge-even coerce-other divers to behave similarly.

Driving home that night, Chatterton contemplated a final reason why he
had determined to leave the remains undisturbed, a reason that seemed
too personal to share with Kohler.  More than ever, diving had become a
reflection of life to Chatterton.  The principles by which he had made
himself a great diver were the same principles by which he lived.  If
he were to lower the bar now because he was frustrated, who would he
be?

Kohler, too, had kept a reason to himself.  His German heritage, so
much a part of his identity since childhood, had been reawakened in
these brushes with the fallen crewmen.  He never kidded himself about
the U-boat's purpose or about the madman who had sent it.  As an
American, he would have attacked the U-boat himself had he been
patrolling the Atlantic.  But he also recognized these fallen men as
Germans.  "These men," Kohler thought to himself, "came from where I'm
from."

It took three months for the Seeker to set sail again for the U-Who.
In September, the divers had to make the most of their opportunity; the
weather would be unpredictable come fall, and this might be the last
U-boat dive of the season.

Optimism aboard the boat was muted this time around.  Chatterton and
Kohler had exhausted their leading theories and had whiffed in their
hunt for an identifying artifact.  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-^rparticularly odd to eavesdroppers-family ancestry.  As before,
Chris said little about what he hoped to accomplish on the U-boat.
Chrissy was more forthcoming.  "I'm going to identify the wreck," the
junior Rouse told Chatterton.  "I'm going to be the one to do it."

As before, Chatterton and Kohler splashed together and tied in the
anchor.  This time, Chatterton swam toward the stern and dropped into
the blown-out deck section that led to the aft torpedo room.  His
off-season research had revealed that this room contained an auxiliary
steering station possibly marked by a brass tag.  But when he began to
look around, he saw a boot, then a life jacket, then several skulls,
femurs, and other remains, a boneyard before him.  It was possible that
the answer to the mystery lay within the remains.  Chatterton turned
and swam out.

Kohler, in the meantime, had chosen to explore forward.  As he entered
the noncommissioned officers' quarters, he spotted the cuff of a dark
blue shirt that appeared to have spilled from a cabinet.  Since it lay
far from the human remains in the compartment, Kohler felt comfortable
tugging at the shirt.  Black silt billowed from the

cuff.  When the cloud cleared, he saw an arm bone in the sleeve.  He
let go of the shirt and apologized aloud, saying, "I'm so sorry.  I had
no idea."  He replaced the shirt where he had found it and began to
leave.  A few feet later, as he neared the galley, he shined his
flashlight under a piece of wood.  The eye sockets from a skull stared
back into his.  Kohler's heart pounded.  This was a bad day.  He
apologized again and made his way from the wreck.

Chatterton and Kohler's second dive was equally unproductive.  The
Rouses, however, had better luck.  In the galley, Chrissy had
discovered a canvaslike fabric imprinted with German writing.

"I don't know what the words mean," Chrissy told Chatterton and the
other divers topside.  "All I know is I gotta dig the thing out.  It's
stuck in there.  But it looks important.  I think I can get it on the
next trip.  This could be the thing."

The Rouses, however, would have to hope that the weather held.  Rough
seas and violent storms could mess with anyone's project over the
course of a long off-season.  As Nagle fired the diesels and turned the
Seeker back toward Brielle, every diver on the boat wished for just one
more trip before winter.

In early October 1992, Nagle booked the Seeker for the season's final
journey to the U-Who.  It would be a two-day venture, held over the
Columbus Day weekend.  The divers would have a final shot.

The day before the trip, Nagle called Chatterton and begged out of the
trip.

"I just don't feel like it," Nagle grunted.

"Bill, this could be the time.  We need you," Chatterton said.

"Don't you get it?"  Nagle exploded.  "After I'm dead nothing matters!
Fuck the U-boat!"

Chatterton tried to reassure his friend, but he had seen this
transformation building all summer.  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.

"You and Danny take the boat," Nagle said, ice clinking in the
background.  "I don't give a shit.  Go without me."

On the night of October 10, the divers gathered at the Seeker's Brielle
dock.  No one had to ask why Nagle was not in the wheel-house.

While the other divers tied down their gear, the Rouses began their
bickering.  This time their argument was a bit more serious than usual.
Neither father nor son could afford tri mix for the trip- they would be
forced to breathe air, a savings of a few hundred dollars.

"Chrissy was supposed to buy the mix this time," Chris sniped.

"No, it was the old man's turn," Chrissy countered.

"Was not."

"Was too."

"Cheapskate."

"Miser."

And so on into the evening.

The next morning, Chatterton and Kohler splashed first, as had become
their custom.  While Kohler explored the NCOs' quarters, Chatterton
returned to the forward torpedo room in search of more tags.  He found
a few made of plastic, but none with identifying information.  On the
way out, he spotted a bent piece of aluminum about the size of a
tabloid newspaper lying amid a pile of wreckage.  Ordinarily, he would
have ignored such junk.  This day, something urged him to pluck it from
amid the garbage and drop it into his bag.  Chatterton gave the
artifact no more thought as he began his ascent to the Seeker.

Topside, Chatterton emptied his bag.  The aluminum piece, Swiss-cheesed
by rust and splotched with marine growth, clanged onto the dressing
table.  Yurga walked over to inspect it.  Chatterton opened the bent
metal as if it were a magazine.  Engraved on the inside were technical
diagrams-a schematic illustrating the mechanical operations of some
part of the U-boat.  Chatterton grabbed a rag from a bucket of fresh
water and wiped it across the artifact.  The sea growth lifted easily,
revealing small German inscriptions along the tattered bottom edge.
Chatterton pulled the schematic toward his face.  He read, "Bauart IXC"
and "Deschimag, Bremen."

"Hold everything," Yurga said.  "Deschimag-Bremen was one of the German
U-boat construction yards.  That means this wreck was a Type IXC built
at Deschimag-Bremen.  There couldn't have been more than a few dozen
Type IXs built there during the entire war.  This is huge for our
research."

Kohler surfaced a few minutes later.  Like Yurga, he understood the
magnitude of the discovery.

"This is really going to narrow things down," Kohler said, slapping
Chatterton's back.  "All we have to do is go home, check our books, and
we'll have the short list of IXCs built at Deschimag.  It's
gorgeous."

The divers splashed again that day but found little.  Their minds, in
any case, were on Chatterton's spectacular find.  That evening over
dinner, as the Seeker rocked in the waves while anchored to the U-boat,
the Rouses admired the schematic and told Chatterton about their day.
They had nearly excavated the piece of canvas covered in German
printing and believed they might be a dive away from bringing it
topside.  Optimism echoed off the salon walls.  The divers wished one
another a good night.  In a single day, a season of dead ends had
transformed itself.

The Atlantic rec used itself from the divers' optimism.  As men slept
aboard the Seeker, the ocean turned the vessel into a bathtub toy,
tossing some divers from their bunks and forcing the captains, Crowell
and Chatterton, to consult the weather radio.  Conditions were snotty
with five-foot waves, and the forecast had changed for the worse.  At
6:30 A.M. Chatterton walked down to the salon and roused the divers.

"It's getting nasty out there," Chatterton said.  "Anyone thinking of
diving best get going now.  After that, we're pulling the hook and
going home."

"You diving, John?"  someone asked.  "Not on a day like this,"
Chatterton said.

Of the fourteen divers on the trip, just six moved from their bunks to
gear up.  Kohler was first and dressed without hesitation.  A half hour
later he rolled into the ocean.  The dive team of Tom

Packer and Steve Gatto followed, as did New Jersey State Trooper Steve
McDougal.  The Rouses also rolled out of bed.

"I'm not diving, forget it," Chrissy said, peering out a cabin window.
"Too rough out there."

"You pussy!"  his father bellowed.  "You got no backbone, kid."

"Didn't you hear, old man?"  Chrissy asked.  "Chatterton said the
weather's nasty and getting worse.  Can't you feel it out there?"

"If you can't dive these conditions, you got no business being out
here," Chris said.  "I can't believe you're my son.  You're an
embarrassment!"

"Okay, you old crow," Chrissy said.  "You want to go diving?  We'll go
diving.  Let's go."

For a moment Chris said nothing.

"Ah ... that's okay," Chris finally said.  "I was just jerking your
chain.  It really is too rough.  Let's pass."

"Too rough?  Maybe too rough for you, you old geezer," Chrissy said,
taking the offensive.  "If you're too soft to go diving, I'll go
myself.  You stay here with the women."

"You're not going without me," Chris said.  "If you go, we both go."

"You guys are too much."  Chatterton laughed, leading the salon.  The
Rouses continued bickering as they decided what to have for breakfast,
whether to shave, how long their dive should last.  Chris jokingly
ordered Barb Lander, the only woman aboard, to fix his breakfast and
wash his dishes.

As the Rouses geared up they reviewed their plan.  Chrissy would return
to the galley to free the piece of canvas containing the German
writing.  It was stuck beneath a floor-to-ceiling steel cabinet.  Chris
would wait outside the wreck, his lights a beacon for his son's exit.
Chrissy would work for twenty minutes before exiting the wreck.  At the
dressing table, the Rouses affixed their trademark hockey-style helmets
and started for the gunwales.  Waves battered the Seeker's stern,
knocking the flipper-footed Chrissy onto his side like an overtired
toddler.  Yurga fork lifted him under the arms and stood him upright.
Another wave rocked the boat.  This time Chrissy did a face-plant onto
the deck.

"Hey, Chris, "Yurga yelled.  "Your kid keeps missing the ocean!"
Finally, Chrissy made it over the gunwale, his father followed,

and their dive was under way.  It took just a minute or two before the
team hit the wreck and made their way from the anchor line to the
opening gouged in the control-room area.  There, Chrissy unfastened the
two small stage bottles he would breathe from on his ascent and laid
them on the U-boat's deck.  Next, he clipped one end of a nylon line to
the torn-open entrance of the U-boat and slithered into the wreck,
allowing the line to un spool from a reel attached to his harness. 
This way, even if the visibility dropped to zero or he became lost or
disoriented, he could follow the line out of the U-boat and back to his
father.  Cave divers like the Rouses called this technique "running a
line" and made it their religion.  Wreck divers, however, did not
believe in depending on nylon lines-or anything else-that could become
tangled or cut inside a wreck's jagged guts.  It took Chrissy just a
minute or two to snake into the galley and begin his work.  The
pillowcase-sized piece of canvas he had worked on for so long still lay
buried under the skeleton of a floor-to-ceiling cabinet made of
heavy-gauge steel.  Chrissy could not hope to move the massive cabinet.
To free the artifact he would have to dig beneath the cabinet into the
rotting debris until enough space had been cleared to pull the canvas
out.  For perhaps fifteen minutes, Chrissy burrowed with his hands,
creating a silt tornado that blackened the room and dropped the
visibility to zero.  He kept digging and pulling.  The canvas began to
loosen from beneath the cabinet.  Chrissy pulled harder.  Mushroom
clouds of silt exploded within the compartment.  The jungle drums beat
louder.  He pulled again.  More canvas came free, then even more, and
it kept coming, like the scarves in a magician's trick, while the drums
pounded louder and Chrissy grew closer to solving the mystery.  Perhaps
just seconds remained in the dive.  Chrissy pulled again.  The steel
cabinet, now deprived of its bottom support, began to collapse,
hurtling several hundred pounds of steel atop Chrissy's head and
burying his face in the hole he had dug.  Chrissy tried to move.
Nothing happened.  He was trapped.

As the gravity of his situation sludged into Chrissy's consciousness,
the feral dog that is narcosis leaped from its cage and set upon him
with fangs fully bared.  His head throbbed.  His mind narrowed.  He
believed, more certainly than he knew his name, that a monster

was on top of him, pinning him.  He tried again to move but could
not-in its collapse, the cabinet had wedged between other debris and
had become part of an interlocking sarcophagus atop the diver. Outside,
Chris checked his watch and saw that his son was overdue.  He had not
planned to penetrate the U-boat.  He was unfamiliar with the area in
which Chrissy was working.  He swam into the wreck.

Chris reached his son and began working to free him from the trap.
Chrissy struggled to climb out but only burned faster through his
remaining air and deepened his narcosis.  Chris kept working.  Finally,
after several minutes, Chrissy came free of the cabinet.  Father and
son now needed to exit the wreck.  Chrissy checked his watch.  It read
thirty minutes.  He and his father were ten minutes over on their
time.

Ordinarily, the Rouses would have followed Chrissy's nylon line out of
the wreck and to the tanks they needed to breathe from to make their
ascent.  But in Chrissy's struggle to free himself, the line had become
tangled around the canvas until it was a morass of knots.  Narcosis
banged like an industrial press inside Chrissy's brain, tunneling his
peripheral vision and lighting the panic fuse of his instincts.  He and
his father swam in the direction of the control room and managed to
exit the submarine through a crack between its skin and bulkhead.  The
tanks and the anchor line were now in front of the divers and just
forty feet away.  All the Rouses had to do was swim aft, locate the
bottles, and begin their ascent.  In the struggle, however, Chrissy had
likely become disoriented and believed himself to be facing the wrong
direction.  He turned around and swam toward the bow-directly away from
the tanks and anchor line.  His father followed.

The Rouses searched frantically for their tanks.  Chris, who had
dropped only one of his stage bottles outside the wreck, gave the
remaining one to Chrissy.  A minute passed and the Rouses kept
searching, but they were now 150 feet from their stage bottles and
their narcosis was spiraling deeper by the second.  Two minutes passed,
then three, then five-still, they could not find their tanks.  They
searched for another five minutes, never knowing that they were turned
around and nowhere near the stage bottles or anchor

line.  Chrissy checked his watch.  He had been underwater for forty
minutes.  The Rouses were now twenty minutes over their dive time.
Their required decompression, originally sixty minutes, had now
expanded to two and a half hours.  Neither had enough air to breathe
for that long.

A clear-thinking diver breathing tri mix likely would have used his
remaining gas to eke out the best decompression possible.  The Rouses,
however, had made this trip without tri mix and were breathing air.
Chrissy, terrified at losing his stage bottles and lost on the wreck,
made a decision that divers spend a lifetime dreading- to bolt for the
surface.  His father shot up after him.  Nagle had a saying about
divers who rocketed to the surface after so long down deep.  "They're
already dead," he would say.  "They just don't know it yet."

The Rouses missiled toward the surface.  At about 100 feet they
intersected a miracle.  Somehow, in their explosive ascent, they
spotted the anchor line, swam to it, and held on.  Now they had a
chance.  They could fashion a decompression from their remaining air,
then switch to the oxygen tank the Seeker dangled at 20 feet for
emergencies.

Chrissy switched from his main tanks to the stage bottle his father had
given him.  He sucked from the new tank and gagged-the mouthpiece had
torn and was delivering water, not air.  That was enough for Chrissy.
He switched back to the main tanks on his back and bolted again for the
surface.  Again, his father followed.  This time, Chrissy would stop
for nothing.

In the Seeker's wheelhouse, Chatterton, Kohler, and Crowelll checked
the weather and shivered-brutal seas and nasty winds!  were rolling in.
A minute later they saw two divers pop to the surface about a hundred
feet in front of the boat.  Chatterton looked closer.l He saw the
hockey-type helmets of the Rouses.  They had come ut an hour ahead of
schedule.

"Oh, Christ," Chatterton said.  "This ain't good."

Chatterton and Kohler tore down the wheelhouse steps and onto the
Seeker's bow.  Chatterton raised his arm and put his fingertips on his
head, the universal "Are you okay?"  signal to divers.  Neither man
responded.  Six-foot waves threw the divers closer to the boat. Chatterton and Kohler looked into the men's faces.  Both father and son
had the wide, rapidly blinking eyes of the newly condemned.

"Did you complete your decompression?"  Chatterton yelled.

Neither diver answered.

"Swim to the boat!"  Chatterton yelled.

Chrissy moved his arms and inched closer to the Seeker.  Chris also
tried to swim, but he flopped sideways and half-kicked like a sick
goldfish.

"Chrissy!  Did you complete your decompression?"  Chatterton pressed.

"No," Chrissy managed to yell back.

"Did you come straight to the surface?"

"Yes," Chrissy said.

Kohler went ashen at the answer.  He remembered the Atlantic Wreck
Divers' mantra: / would rather slit my throat than shoot to the surface
without decompressing.

Chatterton grabbed two throw lines to fling to the Rouses.  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.  Chatterton threw the lines.  Each of the Rouses managed to grab
a rope.  Chatterton and Kohler pulled the divers along the side of the
boat, towing them out from under the Seeker and toward the stern.
Crowell ran into the wheelhouse.  He radioed the Atlantic City Coast
Guard repeatedly but got no reply.

"Fuck this," he thought to himself.  "I'm calling a Mayday."  "Mayday!
Mayday!  Mayday!"  Crowell called into his handheld microphone.  "This
is the vessel Seeker.  Requesting immediate helicopter evacuation.  We
have injured divers.  Please acknowledge."  The Brooklyn Coast Guard
station responded.  They were sending a chopper.

Chatterton, Kohler, and other divers continued to tow the Rouses toward
the back of the boat as the Seeker's bow rose and fell with thunderous
booms.  Chris came around nearest the ladder.  Chatterton rushed
toward him.

"Chris, get up the ladder!"  Chatterton yelled.  "Take Chrissy first,"
Chris grunted.

Chatterton began to insist but stopped himself when he looked into
Chris's widened eyes.  In them, he saw only fear and knowing- the kind
of knowing that occurs when one's fate is certain and moments away.

"Okay, Chrissy, come up!"  Chatterton yelled to the younger Rouse, who
was holding on to a line about ten feet behind his father.  The divers
pulled Chrissy to the ladder.  He screamed in pain.

"I can't move my legs!"  Chrissy yelled.  "Monkeyfuck!  Monkey-fuck! It
hurts!  It hurts so bad!"

Chatterton knew that serious decompression bends were already upon the
divers.  He and Kohler straddled the gunwale on either side of the
ladder and put their arms under Chrissy, grabbing the underside of his
tanks for leverage.  The Seeker rose and fell with nature's onrushing
tantrum, each explosion against the ocean threatening to catapult the
divers overboard and crush Chrissy under the stern.  The lactic acid in
Chatterton's and Kohler's muscles burned as they willed themselves to
hang on to the stricken young diver.  Between impacts, they managed to
lug Chrissy up the ladder until he thudded onto the deck like a netted
tuna.

"Get him onto the dressing table!"  Chatterton ordered.  Kohler and
others dragged Chrissy to the table and began cutting off his gear.
Barb Lander, a nurse by profession, force-fed Chrissy aspirin and water
and put an oxygen mask over his face.

"I fucked up, I fucked up, I fucked up!"  Chrissy yelled.  "I can't
move my legs!"

Lander cradled his head.

"You're okay, Chrissy," she said.  "You're on the Seeker now."

Chrissy thrashed and screamed and tried to tear the oxygen mask from
his face.

"I can't breathe!"  he screamed.  "I'm burning!  A monster pinned me! I
was trapped!"

At the ladder, Chatterton turned his attention to Chris.

"Chris!  Chris!  Come on, you're next.  You can do it!  Let's go!"
Chatterton yelled.

Chris looked into Chatterton's eyes.

"I'm not going to make it," he said.  "Tell Sue I'm sorry."

Chris's chin dropped to his chest and his head flopped into the water.
Chatterton and Kohler, both dressed in street clothes, leaped into the
freezing ocean.  Chatterton lunged for Chris's head and lifted it into
the air.

"Get me a knife!"  Chatterton yelled.  The Seeker bashed up and down in
the Atlantic, hurling Chatterton and Kohler underwater.  When the boat
rose, Chatterton yelled, "I gotta cut his rig off!"

Kohler pointed to a knife sheathed on Chris's shoulder.  Chatterton
grabbed it and slashed at the diver's harness until Chris's rig fell
away.  Chatterton then muscled Chris into a fireman's carry and brought
him up the ladder, straining to hang on as the Seeker heaved and
exploded into the ocean and sent salt water spraying into the men's
eyes.  Kohler looked inside Chris's mask, praying to see more dread
because dread would mean that Chris was still alive.  Chris only stared
straight ahead.  The men dragged him onto the Seeker's deck, his fins
sloshing along the sea-soaked wood.  Chatterton began CPR on the elder
Rouse.

For a few moments, Chris did not respond to Chatterton's efforts.  His
skin began to turn blue.  Kohler murmured, "Come on, Chris, don't let
go ... don't let go ... don't let go ..."  Chatterton kept relentlessly
at his CPR.  Suddenly, Chris threw up into Chatterton's mouth, and
Chatterton could taste the Pepsi he and Chris had shared that morning.
Kohler sprang to his feet, hopeful that the vomiting indicated revival.
Chatterton looked up at Kohler with eyes from 1970 Vietnam.

"Richie, go in the wheelhouse," Chatterton said with a calm that seemed
to Kohler to mute the raging ocean.  "Get pencil and paper.  Write down
times and events.  Be sure to get everything Barb's doing on that table
and everything Chrissy is saying.  Make sure she gets vital signs on
him.  Record everything.  We'll need to send this information with the
Coast Guard."

Chatterton continued the CPR, but with each compression he

felt increasing resistance, evidence that Chris's blood was turning to
foam and clotting in his body.  After five minutes, Chris's heart
stopped and his skin turned from blue to coal gray.  The whites of his
eyes were bloody.  Chatterton knew he was dead.  He kept pumping
anyway.  You did not give up on a human being just because he was
dead.

At the dressing table, Lander pushed Chrissy's long brown hair out of
his face and held his head in her lap as he writhed and screamed and
drifted in and out of lucidity.

"The monster got me!"  he screamed.  "A monster pinned me.  Monkeyfuck!
It was a monkey fuck

Kohler bit his bottom lip and took notes.  "My father!  How is my
father?"  Chrissy asked.  Kohler and Lander looked toward Chatterton as
he pumped away on Chris's lifeless body.  They knew Chris had died.

"John's with your father," Kohler told him.  "He's on oxygen.  He's
gonna be fine.  Hang in, Chrissy.  Can you tell me what happened?"
Chrissy went calm and for a moment spoke with a crystalline mind.  He
told Kohler that something had fallen and pinned him inside the wreck,
that his father had come in and freed him, and that while they were
ascending he had run out of air.  Then, just as quickly, Chrissy
spiraled back into delirium.

"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 feet first 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, undipped 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
re-compression 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 MMJIEU

SHORTLY AFTER THE ROUSES 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 tri mix 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-8S7 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 Niestle- 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 bullet-storms.  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.

"He still works his job?"  Kohler asked.

"Since forever," the archivist replied.

Kohler called London the next day.

An English-accented woman speaking over pillows of static answered the
telephone.

"Scotland Yard.  Can I help you?"

Kohler believed he had misdialed, but did not dare hang up; the idea of
being connected to the legendary crime-fighting headquarters was too
thrilling to abandon.  For a moment he just listened to

the static, imagining men scurrying in deerstalker hats crying, "It's
murder!"

"This is Scotland Yard.  Is anyone on the line?"

Kohler finally said, "I must have the wrong number.  I was trying to
reach Mr.  Robert Coppock at the Ministry of Defence."

"One moment and I'll connect you to Mr.  Coppock," the woman said.

Kohler was beside himself waiting for Coppock.  This was the first time
he had ever spoken to anyone with an English accent.  Across the
Atlantic, in a cavernous office lined with floor-to-ceiling gray filing
cabinets, institutional furniture, and frosted windows, the
silver-haired Coppock settled in among his U-boat history and took the
phone.  Kohler introduced himself.

"Ah, yes, the diver from New Jersey," Coppock said.  "I know of you,
sir.  I have been following your adventure with great interest.  I find
the mystery most intriguing."

Coppock asked detailed questions of Kohler-about the divers' research,
the U-Who, the contacts they had made, about Horen-burg.  Kohler
answered them all, flattered that Coppock spoke to him as a colleague
rather than as a guy from Brooklyn late to replace a window at a
Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, which he was.  When Coppock asked if
the divers had fashioned any theories, Kohler laid out the case for U-857.

Coppock listened intently, then agreed that Kohler had made a
persuasive argument for U-857 as the New Jersey wreck.  He asked if
Kohler would like him to consult his records and sources and look into
the matter further.

Kohler nearly blurted, "Hell yeah!"  Instead, he managed, "Yes, sir,
I'd be grateful for that kind of help.  Thank you very much."

As he sped to fix the window at KFC, Kohler called Chatterton from his
truck.

"John, I talked to Coppock.  The guy must be seventy-five years old but
he's totally on the ball.  And he works at friggin' Scotland Yard!"

"What'd he say?"  Chatterton asked.  "You're killing me here-" "I laid
out the case for U-857.  He said it sounded 'persuasive."  He really
liked it.  He's going to look into it on his end."

"Beautiful," Chatterton said.  "What an amazing
adventure we're on.

"That's what it is," Kohler said.  "An amazing adventure."

Shortly after Kohler spoke to Coppock, the divers contacted Horst
Bredow and Charlie Grutzemacher in Germany and made the case for
U-857.  Each of the archivists absorbed the evidence, pulled out his
own records, asked a few questions, then agreed-the U-Who almost
certainly was U-857.  Kohler redialed Scotland Yard (really Great
Scotland Yard, a different place from the fabled police station) to
follow up with Coppock.  This conversation was brief.  Coppock told
Kohler that he had consulted records and considered further the divers'
theory.  As before, he believed it likely that the divers had
discovered U-857.

As the early months of 1993 wore on, Chatterton and Kohler continued to
meet for steaks or pizza.  They no longer speculated, however, about
the U-Who's identity; that question was settled.  Instead, they began
to imagine how the U-boat had met its end.  By now, they had conferred
with several munitions experts.  All evidence pointed in a single
direction: the U-boat had been destroyed by a massive explosion, the
kind most likely caused by a torpedo.

But whose torpedo?  If an Allied sub had fired on the U-boat, there
would have been a record of the incident.  If another U-boat had fired
and inadvertently hit the sub, that too would have been recorded. Could
one of the U-boat's own torpedos have exploded accidentally from
within?  Impossible, as the blast damage showed a strike from outside
the sub.  That seemed to leave a single explanation.  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.

"Imagine you're Budolf Premauer, commander of LJ-857," Kohler said to
Chatterton one night at Scotty's.  "You've made it through icy waters
and past swarms of Allied aircraft all the way from Norway to the
United States.  You've narrowly escaped a hunter-killer group off

Boston and now you're in New Jersey, a few miles from Manhattan.  You
spot a target steaming in the distance.  You order your men to their
battle stations, climb into the conning tower, and raise the attack
periscope.  You've got your target locked.  You give the order" Fire
torpedo!  "The torpedo flies out the tube.  Everyone's silent and
hopeful, waiting for an explosion in the distance.  Nothing happens.
Then, from the sound room, the radioman says, "Circle-runner!  We have
a circle-runner!  Our torpedo is bearing down on us!"  Premauer orders
the sub to crash-dive; it's their only hope.  Now it's a race, the
U-boat against her own torpedo, and there's only one question: Can the
U-boat submerge before the torpedo strikes?  The men are doing
everything humanly possible to drop that boat.  Do they have twenty
seconds?  Five seconds?  They don't know.  They give it everything
they've got.  Too late.  The torpedo hits.  Seven hundred pounds of
TNT.  It's too goddamned late."

"And that explains why there's no incident report from the area,"
Chatterton said.  "It's probably night.  It's winter.  When the torpedo
hits the U-boat, no one on the target vessel is going to hear it
because it occurs underwater, and even^ if they do hear a muffled
explosion, hell, it's wartime-muffled explosions are everywhere.  The
U-boat sinks and no one has a clue she went down."

For a minute, each diver poked at his food but said nothing.  "Imagine
the feeling that radio guy has the moment he realizes the torpedo's
coming back," Kohler said.

"Imagine the certainty that either your life will end violently in a
few seconds or the circle-runner's going to miss," Chatterton said.
"There's no middle ground.  You know it's one or the other."

The next morning, Chatterton searched through the piles of crew lists
he had copied at Bredow's archive in Germany.  On the bottom was that
of U-857.  He scanned the roster, fifty-nine men with names like Dienst
and Kausler, Lofgren and Wulff.  Some of these men were nineteen or
twenty years old.  The senior radioman was Erich Krahe, born on March
14, 1917.  If a circle-runner torpedo had killed this U-boat, perhaps
he had been the first to realize it was coming.  Kohler searched his
books for photographs of twenty-five-year-old commander Premauer.
Chatterton and Kohler still had two months before the start of the 1993
dive season, time enough to

learn about the last year of the U-boat war, the year that had
delivered the men they had discovered.

By 1993, Kohler had built a collection of U-boat books worthy of a
university library.  Now he spread those books on his living room floor
like a kid's baseball-card collection and divided them in half.  He
would lend Chatterton one pile for study and keep the other for
himself.  Between them, they held in their hands the story of the men
who'd waged the final campaign of the U-boat war, the men who lay dead
in their wreck.

Chatterton and Kohler settled into their reading chairs at home and
began with page one: primitive submarines had existed during the
American Revolution.  Each fidgeted with page two: the torpedo was
invented by an English engineer in 1866.  Neither waited around for
page three.  The divers needed to know what had happened to their men.
They flipped their books to the final chapters.  They found hundreds of
pages soaked in blood.

By the war's end, more than thirty thousand U-boat men out of a force
of about fifty-five thousand had been killed-a death rate of almost 55
percent.  No branch of a modern nation's armed forces had ever
sustained such casualties and kept fighting.  The U-boats had kept
fighting.  But it was worse than that.  The late-war U-boat man, it
turned out, had had it perhaps deadliest of all.

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.  Over the years,
the divers had read dozens of war books, but none had affected them as
deeply as the final pages of these volumes.  As Chatterton and Kohler
pored over the body counts, they found themselves hoping for a better
ending, not for the Nazis or for Germany but maybe for a crewman or
two, for one of these kids whose shoes were still lined up neatly on
the mangled U-Who, and when the divers could not find hope for the
late-war U-boat man, they called each other and agreed that they had
never turned a book's pages like this because they'd never before felt
as if they had been reading about men they knew.

By nearly every account, the late-war U-boat man had not just fought
through the final hours of World War II but had done so nobly and
bravely, all the while knowing the grim odds against his survival.  The
Allies had predicted mutinies aboard these doomed U-boats.  That never
happened.  The Allies had expected surrender from these doomed U-boats.
That never happened, either.  In January 1945, even as the Allies
hunted and killed U-boats with unflinching regularity, Churchill
summoned top military commanders and warned them of the "much more
offensive spirit" displayed by U-boats at sea.  It was this idea-that
the beaten U-boat man was doing more than just trying to survive-that
kept Chatterton and Kohler reading.

In October 1940, at the peak of what German submariners called the
"Happy Time," U-boats sank sixty-six ships while losing only one of
their own.  The U-boats enjoyed a second "Happy Time" in early 1942
with Operation Drumbeat, a surprise attack on American ships off the
U.S. East Coast.  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 that many of them loved.  The first weeks of
Drumbeat were a slaughter as U-boats torpedoed unprotected ships.  Body
parts, oil, and wreckage washed up along the eastern seaboard.  Five
months later, just a few U-boats had sunk nearly six hundred ships in
American waters at a cost of just six of their own, the worst defeat
ever suffered by the U.S. Navy.  In Germany, U-boats were welcomed back
to harbor by bands, flowers, and lovely ladies.  Churchill wrote, "The
only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat
peril."  It was no longer safe to be Goliath in a world where David
could turn invisible.

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.

Scientists joined the war effort from U.S. laboratories and
universities.  One of their most potent weapons was radar.  Even in
total

darkness or a violent storm, radar-equipped airplanes and ships could
detect a surfaced submarine at great distances.  While submarines had
long enjoyed the luxury of operating primarily on the surface, where
subs moved considerably faster than they could while submerged, they
suddenly found themselves pounced upon by Allied aircraft that seemed
to appear in the sky as if by magic.  For a time, Karl Donitz, the
commander in chief of the U-boat force, did not fully appreciate the
radar threat.  His submariners continued to die.  Even when Germany
finally grasped the situation's gravity, the U-boats could do little
but submerge and stay underwater, which protected them from radar but
made them too slow to catch or evade enemies.

The underwater environment presented its own perils.  An Allied ship
that suspected there was a submerged U-boat in its vicinity could use
sonar-the broadcast of sound waves-to sniff it out.  Once sonar echoed
off the submarine's metallic form, a U-boat was tagged for death-unable
to outrun the enemy while underwater, a fish in a barrel if it chose to
surface and fight it out with its guns.

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.  The
Allies wasted little time dispatching hunter-killer groups to U-boats
so exposed.

Perhaps the deadliest Allied breakthrough came in the form of code
breaking.  Since the war's beginning, the German military had encrypted
its communications through a cipher machine known as Enigma.  A boxy,
typewriter-like device capable of millions of character combinations,
Enigma was believed by the German High Command to be invincible, the
strongest code ever created.  Allied code breakers estimated the odds
against a person cracking Enigma without knowing the code to be
150,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. They tried anyway.  Building on years
of pioneering work by Polish cryptanalysts, and with the help of a
captured Enigma machine and key documents, teams of cryptographers,
mathematicians, Egyptol

ogists, scientists, crossword puzzle experts, linguists, and chess
champions spent months attacking Enigma, even building the world's
first programmable computer to aid in the effort.  The mental strain
and pressure could have overwhelmed them.  They kept at it.  Months
later, with the help of covert intelligence, they cracked it-one of the
great intellectual achievements of the twentieth century.  By late
1943, the Allies were using intercepted Enigma messages to direct
hunter-killer groups to unsuspecting U-boats.  Donitz suspected that
Enigma could be compromised, but was constantly assured by experts that
Enigma was unbreakable.  The Allies continued to read the German mail.
U-boats continued to die.

By spring 1943, the fangs of Allied technology had encircled the
U-boats, leaving no safe areas in the ocean.  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 Donitz 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.

By early 1945, U-boats stood a greatly reduced chance of inflicting
damage or even surviving.  Younger crews replaced the elite, handpicked
service that had threatened in the early war to dominate the world.
Allied bombing devastated German cities.  France had been lost.  The
Russian army had crossed onto German soil.  Aboard a U-boat, surrounded
by killers who might know its every move in advance, a U-boat crewman
could not even dream of safe haven back home.  His Germany was
falling.

As Chatterton and Kohler digested the late U-boat war, each discovered
a new pride for Allied ingenuity and tenacity, for the ability of the
United States to dig deep into its instinct for freedom, rise up
against one of history's most terrifying threats, and pound it down
until the world was safe again.  Yet neither of them could put out of
his mind the crewmen lying dead in their wreck.  They did not speak to
wives or coworkers or friends about these thoughts.  Instead, they made
a plan to meet at Scotty's.

The conversation that night was different from the others the divers
had shared over dinner.  Before, Chatterton and Kohler had talked in
broad terms-about research, theories, strategies-large

thoughts about solving the U-Who mystery.  Now, educated in the
hopelessness of the late U-boat war, they found themselves thinking on
a smaller scale, a scale that envisioned the lives of men with whom
they had become intertwined.

Over and over, they asked each other, "How could these men have kept
fighting?"  Part of the answer, for Chatterton and Kohler, lay in
Donitz's own characterization of a U-boat crew.  He had called them a
Schicksalsgemeinschaft-a community bound by fate-in which each man "is
dependent on the other, and is thereby sworn to one another."  To the
divers, such a band of brotherhood seemed about the most noble of human
instincts, and as they nursed after-dinner coffees, that instinct
seemed also to describe their friendship.

There was another answer, one that each of the divers had been
contemplating but about which neither spoke.  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.  Chatterton and
Kohler could back out now and abandon their search for conclusive
identification-they already were certain of the subs identity.  But as
each man drove home that night he wondered: What will that say about me
if I quit?  What will it mean if life tests me and I do not try to
strike a blow?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"A MISSEU3TURAI

In LATE May 1993, as the residents of Brielle rubbed winter from their
eyes, the divers booked the Seeker for the season's first U-boat trip.
By now, Chatterton and Kohler had taken to calling the wreck U-857 and
even announcing their finding to dive show audiences.  Many people
asked the divers why they planned to continue searching such a
dangerous wreck now that they had deduced its identity.  The divers
responded that until they pulled proof from the wreck, everything else
was mere opinion.  They had not come this far, they said, to stand on
mere opinion.

The first U-boat trip of 1993 was scheduled for May 31, Memorial Day.
As Chatterton and Kohler drove their cars to the Seeker's dock, neither
could remember having felt so content.  Chatterton had made every
important discovery inside the wreck and had gone places on the
submarine no other diver had.  He had been relentless in his research
until his thinking had produced a solution even the world's great
U-boat minds did not dispute.

Kohler felt a similar satisfaction.  Two years ago, he had been a
ferocious tonnage king and Atlantic Wreck Divers fundamentalist.  He'd
lived to haul shit and raise hell in between.  But as he'd come to know
the U-boat and feel its crew, as he'd watched Chatterton dedicate
entire dives to shooting video for later study, as he'd done original
research that had corrected written history, the jaws of habit had

loosened and he'd come to feel himself not just a diver but an
explorer, a pass-holder to the landing place of his childhood dreams.

Not everyone celebrated this evolution.  During the off-season, some of
Kohler's Atlantic Wreck Divers mates had lashed out at the betrayal.
"So, you're diving with your new buddies, are ya?"  they'd ask when
Kohler found time to make their charters that spring.  "How's it feel
diving with that asshole who put up the grate on the Doria?"

For a time, the criticism hurt Kohler.  These friends had delivered him
into deep-wreck diving; their guidance had kept him alive.  Chatterton
could see how deeply the barbs cut Kohler.  He spoke up on those
occasions.

"Your friends have plans this season," Chatterton told Kohler.  "Diving
the Oregon again.  Diving the Saw Diego again.  What do they want,
another plate from the Oregon} Another bowl like the one they got
twelve bowls ago?  That's bullshit, Richie.  That's against the spirit
of diving.  You don't buy it.  If you did, you wouldn't be diving the
U-boat."

Kohler always answered the same way: "You're right, John.  Things have
changed for me."

Things had changed so much, in fact, that Kohler had dedicated part of
his off-season to converting to tri mix  He had seen Chatter-ton's and
Yurga's diving transformed by the safety and benefits offered by the
new gas.  And he believed the Rouses had died for a onetime decision to
breathe air.  Kohler had committed himself so fully, in fact, that he
had given up smoking so he could optimize his abilities underwater.

The parking lot at Brielle looked emptier than usual to the arriving
divers, though none found himself surprised.  If Feldman's death had
suggested the U-Who's reputation as a death trap, the Rouses' demise
had cemented it.  Word in the diving community had it that there were a
thousand ways to die on this wreck, that if the depth didn't kill you
the sub's dangling steel or anarchy of wires would.  The trip was
expensive-$150 just for the ride.  Mantel-worthy artifacts were
virtually nonexistent.  The media had long since gone home.  Divers
capable of this depth wanted prizes, and they wanted to live.  Most
said "No thanks" to the U-Who.

On board the Seeker, the gathered divers shook hands and compared
off-season notes.  Near midnight, a skeleton wobbled from the Horrible
Inn toward the Seeker.  No one spoke.  The figure drew closer, feet
dragging the dirt parking lot as it approached the pier.  "That's
Bill," someone whispered.

Nagle's face was yellow from jaundice and splotched with purple
bruises.  His hair was oily and his T-shirt grimy.  He weighed perhaps
120 pounds, skin dripping from his legs, the remaining bump of his
potbelly the only evidence of a man of former appetites.  Under his arm
he carried the cowboys-and-Indians sleeping bag he had used since
boyhood, the one he'd brought along when he had taken the bell off the
Andrea Doria in the days when he ruled the world.

The divers screwed on their best faces.  "Hiya, Bill," someone said.
"The Seeker's looking beautiful, Bill," said another.  As the boat left
the dock that night, everyone on board gave thanks that Chatterton and
Crowell-two capable and sober captains-were also on hand.

As the Seeker steamed for the U-Who, the divers made a final review of
their strategies.  Packer aniGatto, perhaps the country's finest
wreck-diving team, would penetrate the diesel motor room.  In addition
to housing the submarine's massive diesel engines, this compartment
contained gauge panels, telegraphs, and other equipment possibly
engraved with the U-boat's identity.  Until now, the diesel motor room
had been inaccessible, its entrance blocked by massive air-intake
ductwork that had fallen from the upper casement of the submarine.
Packer and Gatto, however, had prepared to forcibly remove the
obstruction, even if it required using a rope and several lift bags, a
risky operation in close quarters.  Such access would yield an
additional benefit.  By gaining entry to the diesel motor room, the
divers would also have a clear shot into the adjoining electric motor
room, the only other remaining compartment inaccessible to divers.

Chatterton's plan was simpler.  He would return to the wreck's forward
section-the radio room, sound room, commander's quarters, and officers'
quarters-areas he had already explored.  Once there, he would become
nearly motionless.

"This is a matter of seeing," he told Yurga on the boat.  "This is a

matter of looking at a big pile of garbage until one little thing in
the pile starts to look a little different than the rest.  I'm looking
for a glimmer of order in the chaos.  I think if I just start digging,
I'm never going to see more than the pile.  But if I just stay quiet
and look long enough, I think I'll see something."

Kohler's plan was similar.  His off-season research had uncovered
dozens of photographs in which U-boat crewmen held lighters or pocket
watches or wore hats emblazoned with a U-boat number or logo.  Like
Chatterton, he believed important items would be located in the forward
part of the wreck, where the crewmen had slept and stored their
personal effects.  Unlike Chatterton, however, he was willing to dig,
trusting his hands to become his eyes in the black silt clouds raised
by his activity, willing to reach anywhere he was certain did not
contain human remains.

The morning sun was a brilliant alarm clock.  As they had the previous
season, Chatterton and Kohler splashed together.  Kohler inhaled his
tri mix the voodoo gas he had sworn would kill its heathen users.  He
continued living.  At 100 feet Kohler checked his mind for narcosis,
and Chatterton checked Kohler checking himself.  No drums.  At 200 feet
Kohler stopped on the anchor line to process the scene.  On air at this
depth, his vision would have already narrowed.  "Unbelievable," he
thought.  "This is the difference between watching a portable kitchen
TV and going to a movie theater."  He flashed Chatterton an okay sign.
Chatterton grinned.  The two divers wriggled inside the wreck and swam
forward toward the sections where so many crewmen had died, the section
where vision would be key.  Kohler penetrated farthest, landing in the
noncommissioned officers' quarters, the place he knew as a boneyard.
Chatterton settled into the commander's quarters.  He had not said much
to anyone, but he believed that he stood a chance of recovering the
ship's log, the KTB, in this area.  Artifacts with legible writing had
survived shipwrecks older than this one, and the KTB would be the
ultimate find: a first-person account of the sub's mission, targets,
hopes, fears, and dying.  If the KTB still existed, only quiet eyes
would find it.  Chatterton began to go still.

At first, the wreckage in the commander's quarters appeared as the junk
pile Chatterton expected.  He settled in and absorbed the scene.

Still, junk.  As minutes passed and he stayed locked on the scene,
however, specks of order began to dance in and out of the chaos.

"That shape is not random," Chatterton thought as he reached forward
into the pile of rubble.  He pulled out a pristine leather boot.

"That speck of metal is smoother than the rest," he considered as he
pushed his hand into another wreckage heap.  He pulled out a signal
flare.

"That brown is not from nature," he speculated as he fidgeted his hand
into a mound of splintered wood.  He pulled out a crewman's escape
lung-complete with small oxygen tank, breathing apparatus, and vest.

In twenty minutes, Chatterton had salvaged three prime artifacts he had
overlooked on earlier dives to these forward rooms.  Each likely
contained writing.  The escape lung seemed the most promising.  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.  When Chatterton climbed aboard, Nagle dragged himself
over to inspect the artifacts.  Chatterton could smell his body odor
and see the dirt in his hair.  He put his arm around Nagle and asked
the captain to help him undress.  It was a good feeling, Chatterton
thought, to still dream to dive like Nagle.

Kohler followed Chatterton onto the boat and threw off his tanks.  He
had recovered only some pieces of a coffeepot, so he rushed to the dive
table to join in the inspection of Chatterton's finds.  The divers
placed the leather boot, the flare, and the escape lung in a bucket of
fresh water and sloshed them around.  Nagle removed the boot first and
dabbed a towel at the grime.  The divers crowded in, each of them
looking for a name or initials or other writing.  The boot was
barren-its owner had written nothing.

Next, Nagle pulled the shotgun shell-shaped flare from the

bucket.  This is what the crewmen would have fired into the air from a
pistol in case of distress.  He rubbed it in soft, genie-lamp circles.
German writing appeared in answer.  The words, however, provided just a
manufacturer's name and the flare's gauge size.

Only the escape lung remained.  It consisted of a brownish rubberized
canvas life vest, a black corrugated rubber tube, an orange rubber
mouthpiece, and a thermos-sized aluminum oxygen cylinder, from which
crewmen could breathe in emergencies.  Of the three artifacts, it was
in the worst condition.  Much had eroded in the ocean environment.  The
oxygen bottle was dented in the middle and bent out of alignment. Nagle
wiped at the apparatus.  Mud fell away.  There was no writing. Nagle
rubbed further.  This time, from the handle of the mouthpiece, a tiny
eagle and swastika materialized.

"Is there a name written anywhere?"  Kohler asked.  Nagle wiped some
more.

"No name," Nagle said.  "Looks like it coulda belonged to any of em."

Chatterton's hopes drifted off the Seeker and evaporated in the
midmorning breeze.

"Zero for three," he said.  "This wreck is one tough SOB."  He took the
escape lung and placed it in his cooler.  "May as well take it home,
clean it, and let it dry," he told Yurga.  "Who knows?  Maybe I'll see
some writing if I let the canvas dry completely."

At the ladder, Packer and Gatto surfaced with promising news.  The
fallen ductwork that had blocked entry to the diesel motor room had
disappeared during the off-season, a gift from a winter storm.  Inside,
the team had seen several instruments and pieces of equipment, any one
of which might be engraved with the U-boat's number.  Another dive and
they would have time to begin inspection.

"How much of the diesel motor room did you see?"  Kohler asked.

"Not much," Packer said.  "We only got about ten feet inside.

There's another huge obstruction that blocks the rest of the way.  You
still can't reach the electric motor room.  But I think we got in far
enough to hit it big."

"Congrats," Chatterton said.  "I think you guys have done it."

Rough seas and plummeting visibility cut short most of the second
dives.  As Nagle pulled up anchor and coaxed the boat to life, many of
the divers fantasized aloud about the wonders Packer and Gatto would
yank from the diesel motor room when next they got the chance.  At
first Chatterton led the discussion, recounting the treasures he had
seen in the same room on U-505 in the Chicago museum.  But as the
divers kept talking, Chatterton fell quiet, looking instead at his
cooler and imagining the tattered escape lung inside, wondering if
there might be order inside that broken artifact, and wondering about
this U-boat in which nothing was exactly as it seemed.

Chatterton returned home from the Memorial Day dive near midnight.  He
unpacked his gear quietly, careful not to awaken his wife.  When only
the cooler remained, he fished out the escape lung and walked it into
his garage.  Shelves everywhere held the overflow of shipwreck
artifacts from Chatterton's house, making the garage a museum of his
underwater daring.  He found a spot for the battered lung alongside
several years' bounty of Andrea Dorui serving bowls, silverware, and
china.  He figured it would take several days for the piece to fully
dry.  Inside his house, Chatterton washed his face and thought, "Packer
and Gatto are going to be the ones to recover proof of the wreck's
identity."

A few days later, Chatterton went to his garage to check on the escape
lung.  He stood dumbfounded at the door.  Broken china lay strewn
across the floor.  Shattered glass had been shrapneled against the
walls and ceiling.  A thick wooden shelf lay broken and dangling.

"Someone blew up my garage," Chatterton said aloud.  "Someone came in
here with a bomb."

Dazed, he searched for a broom and began sweeping.  Virtually nothing
on the garage shelves had survived.  He kept sweeping.  In the rubble,
he spotted a metallic silver shape.  He picked it up.  This was the
escape lung's oxygen bottle, but it was no longer cylindrical and
closed.  Now it was flattened, like a toothpaste tube sliced open.

"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.

Chatterton knew right away what the numbers meant.  He ran into his
home and called Kohler.

"Richie, man, the oxygen bottle blew up my garage," he said.  "What?"

"The escape lung.  Remember the oxygen bottle?  It was still charged. I
let it dry in my garage.  The corrosion must have caused it to blow.
All my Doria stuff in the garage is destroyed.  My garage is like a war
zone.  But listen to this: the explosion produced a clue.  The bottle
has a date on it-fifteen-dot-four-dot-forty-four-that's European for
April 15, 1944.  That's the hydrostatic test date, the date the bottle
was examined and certified to be good."

"That means our U-boat sailed after April 15, 1944," Kohler said.
"Exactly."

"I'll be right there."

Chatterton returned to the garage.  He picked up the broom but could
not sweep.  Only now did it occur to him how lucky he had been while
handling the escape lung.  He had carried the artifact in his goody bag
for his hour-long decompression, eyeballed it on board the Seeker,
stored it next to his pickup truck's gas tank, moved it around on his
garage shelves.  As he awaited Kohler's arrival, two thoughts tolled
inside his mind.  First, it seemed more certain than ever that the
wreck was U-857, which had departed for war in February 1945.  And
second, perhaps the divers were getting too close- that, crazy as it
sounded, maybe the dead crewmen were beginning to fight back.

A few hours after finding his garage blown up, Chatterton called Major
Gregory Weidenfeld, the Civil Air Patrol historian who had dedicated
himself to proving that two everyday civilians in a private plane had
sunk a U-boat off New Jersey in 1942.

"Listen, Greg," Chatterton said.  "We found a hydrostatic test date

that proves the wreck sailed sometime after April 15, 1944.  That
excludes the chance that this is your U-boat.  I'm really sorry."

For a moment, Chatterton believed he could hear Weidenfeld struggling
to compose himself.  He could not remember a time when he had met
someone so loyal to the memories of the slighted.

"Thank you, John," Weidenfeld said.  "That means there's another U-boat
out there you'll have to find."

A few days later, Chatterton received word that his friend the U-boat
ace Karl-Friedrich Merten had died at age eighty-seven.  The news was
not unexpected, as Merten had been ill for some time.  But Chatterton
knew that Merten's passing, together with his own good-bye to
Weidenfeld, meant that a chapter in the divers' quest had closed.  For
a year, Chatterton, Kohler, and Yurga had considered U-158 (via the
Civil Air Patrol) and U-851 (via Merten's information about his
colleague Weingartner) as the likeliest solutions to the mystery.  They
had cut their research teeth on these theories, and had considered the
men friends.

Weather and scheduling prevented the Seeker from returning to the U-Who
until July 31, two months after the season's first trip.  The divers
practically had to sit on their hands to contain themselves when the
boat finally departed for the wreck.  This would be the trip when
Packer and Gatto would begin to make their haul from the diesel motor
room.

The next morning, Chatterton and Kohler splashed and headed toward the
sub's forward compartments, areas they still thought likely to yield
identifying artifacts.  As before, Chatterton studied the debris field,
quieting his mind to acclimate his eyes to the shapes of order.  In the
commander's quarters, lying in plain view, he spotted a pair of
binoculars.

"I've been here a dozen times and there were no binoculars in here,"
Chatterton thought.  "There's no way I would have missed that."

Chatterton lifted the binoculars to his mask.  Some optics were
missing, and much was encrusted in sea growth.  He placed the piece in
his bag.  If the pair had belonged to the commander, perhaps his name
lay inscribed underneath the muck.  The remainder of Chatterton's
search produced little.  All the while he thought

about how poetic it was to have recovered binoculars in a dive
dedicated to seeing.

Kohler continued to dig in the noncommissioned officers' quarters.  He
had been meticulous in avoiding the closet in which the crewmen's shoes
lay neatly arranged, as well as other areas near the compartment's
abundant human remains.  In a silt pile he spotted what appeared to be
a bowl and brought it to his mask for inspection.  It took just a
moment for Kohler to realize he was holding a skull.  Silt poured from
the eye sockets and nasal cavity.  A year ago he might have panicked
and flung the skull back into the debris.  Today, he held it and looked
into its eyes.

"I'm going to do my best to figure out your name," Kohler said aloud.
"Your families should know where you are."

It was time to leave the wreck.  He took the skull and gently placed it
in such a way as to allow it to look out over the compartment and its
mates.

Topside, Chatterton and Kohler washed the binoculars.  The apparatus
was unmarked.  Now they could do no more than await the arrival of
Packer and Gatto, who had gone to work inside the promising diesel
motor room.  An hour later that team climbed the ladder.  Packer's
goody bag bulged.  He opened the mesh container and removed a pressure
gauge the size of a dinner plate-one of the instruments Chatterton and
Kohler had seen in books stamped with a U-boat's identity.  The divers
pressed in for a closer look.  Etched on the gauge's aluminum face was
the eagle and swastika.  The rest of the face, however, contained only
generic words and numerals.  Packer wiped the gauge's body.  It nearly
crumbled in his hands.  As with the torpedo room tags, this instrument
had been constructed with the cheap metal porridge used by Germany
during its late-war raw-materials shortage.  The implication was grave:
other artifacts inside the diesel motor room-including identifying
tags-were probably made of the same low-grade materials and had likely
not survived the ocean environment.

Ripping currents made short work of most second dives.  That night, as
the Seeker cut through the blue-black Atlantic on her way back to
Brielle, few of the divers found themselves with much to say.  In the
wheelhouse, while Nagle muttered, "This goddamned

U-boat ... ," Chatterton made a short entry in his logbook.  It read,
"Where to next?"

The Seeker made four trips to the U-boat over the next six weeks.
Packer and Gatto continued their work inside the open portion of the
diesel motor room.  They gathered beautiful and interesting artifacts:
a gauge panel, plastic tags, even a telegraph, the instrument used to
signal orders like ALL STOP, FULL AHEAD, and DIVE.  All the marks were
generic; none identified the wreck.  Further access into the
compartment was blocked by a massive steel pipe that lay angled in the
narrow walkway between the two diesel engines.  Kohler recognized this
pipe as an escape trunk, a vertical tunnel with an interior ladder
through which crewmen could flee a sinking U-boat.  Now wedged between
the engines and reaching from floor to ceiling, the escape trunk
blocked any further penetration into the diesel motor room and the
adjoining electric motor room.  The loss did not seem severe-if the
smorgasbord of items Packer and Gatto had thus far recovered revealed
nothing^ bout the U-boat's identity, it was unlikely that the remainder
of these technical-rooms held the answer.

Chatterton and Kohler devoted their dives to the U-boat's forward
section.  They recovered various artifacts-bowls, cups, shoes,
gauges-not a bit of which contained identification.  Chatterton pulled
two gems from the wreck, museum-quality pieces that drew gasps from his
fellow divers.  One of them, lying fully exposed in an area Chatterton
had combed a dozen times before, was a surgeon's kit, a collection of
stainless steel medical instruments complete with instructional
diagrams-printed in still-brilliant red and black inks-on linen
canvases.  None of it, however, revealed the wreck's identity.

"You guys can have all these instruments," Chatterton told the other
divers.  "I'll keep the diagrams for my house."

"Christ, John, that surgeon's kit is a gorgeous find, one of a kind,"
someone said.  "You can't give it away."

"I'm looking to identify the wreck," Chatterton replied.  "The kit
doesn't do it.  It's yours."

On the next trip, Chatterton recovered the chronometer-the U-boat's
precision clock-from the commander's quarters.  It was another major
score.  As with the surgeon's kit, he had found the chronometer lying
in the open in an area of the commander's quarters he had searched
repeatedly.  Topside, he inspected the handsome instrument for evidence
of the wreck's identity.  Except for the markings of the eagle and
swastika, there was none.  Chatterton moved to throw overboard the
chronometer's wooden box.

"What the hell are you doing?"  Kohler asked, rushing forward.  "The
box tells us nothing," Chatterton said.  "It's a spectacular find!  Are
you crazy?  That's a career find!"  "That's not what's important."

"Give me the clock and the box," Kohler said.  "I got a restoration
guy.  Give it to me and I'll make it beautiful for your house."
"Whatever you want, Richie."  "Christ, John, what's going on with
you?"

Riding back to Brielle that night, Chatterton told Kohler what was
going on with him.  He had begun the dive season with a ferocious
optimism, certain that his brand of hard work, preparation, and
instinct-his artistry-would pay off in a positive identification of the
wreck.  Now, four months and six trips later, he found himself with all
kinds of crazy thoughts.  He worried for the first time that a
greenhorn diver would climb the Seeker's ladder with an identification
tag stuck to his fin, becoming the accidental but official discoverer
of the U-Who's name.

"It's not that I care about who gets the credit," he told Kohler. "It's
that it would mean my approach hadn't worked."

He worried about how he and Kohler had missed major artifacts in
earlier explorations only to find them lying in the open on later
dives.

"It's like the crewmen are putting stuff out for me," Chatterton said.
"But it's not the stuff I want.  It's like they're saying, "Hey, let's
put out the binoculars for him; that'll really get him going."  "
Kohler put down his beer.

"Listen, John, we can do it," Kohler said.  "If I have to row us out
here in a canoe I'll do it.  I'm with you.  I believe in what we're
doing.  Let's keep pounding.  You tell me what you need and I'm there.
We ain't quitting."

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.  Chatterton shook Kohler's hand.

"We ain't quitting," he said.

Even as October's autumn settled over New Jersey, Chatterton and Kohler
believed they might squeeze in another trip or two to the U-Who. Nagle,
however, was of a different mind.  Little more than a skeleton, he was
no longer capable of captaining the Seeker.

His business had begun to fail.  When prospective customers inquired
about charters, Nagle would say, "Oh, that's a nice request, but how
about this: Fuck you!  I'm dying!  I don't care about you or your sunny
smiles or your bullshit artificial-reef wrecks!  I never cared anything
about you!  Don't you get it?  I'm gonna die!  Goodbye!"  As the season
wore on, Chatterton found it painful to look at his old friend and
mentor.

In October, Nagle was rushed by his girlfriend to the hospital,
bleeding from the throat.  Years of alcohol abuse had caused him to
develop esophageal varices, varicose veins in his throat, which had
then ruptured.  Doctors hurried him to surgery and cauterized the
damage.  In the recovery room they told him, "You came within fifteen
minutes of bleeding to death.  If you continue to consume alcohol, even
a single drink, we might not be able to save you next time."

Nagle's girlfriend broke up with him while he was still in the
hospital.  She could not bear to watch him kill himself.  A few weeks
later, Nagle checked himself out of the hospital.  On the way home he
stopped at the liquor store.  That night, after consuming nearly a full
bottle of vodka, he bled to death from the throat.  Bill Nagle, one of
the greatest shipwreck divers of all time, the man who had taken the
bell off the Andrea Doria, was dead at forty-one.

Divers from across the Northeast made plans to attend Nagle's funeral
in Pennsylvania.  Chatterton, one of his dearest friends, did not.
Kohler could not accept that decision.

"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."

"You should go," Kohler said.  "You need to say good-bye to your
friend."

Chatterton could not bring himself to attend.  At the funeral, Kohler
and the other pallbearers lifted Nagle's coffin.  As he walked Nagle to
the grave, Kohler could not get over the lightness of the box.  "It's
like there's nothing inside," he thought to himself, and it was then
that he wished most of all that Chatterton was beside him.

Three dive seasons had passed since the U-Who's discovery.  Though
certain that the wreck was U-857, Chatterton and Kohler were no closer
to proving it than they had been in 1991.

As winter claimed New Jersey, Chatterton noticed fraying around the
edges of his marriage.  While he had worked to master the U-Who, Kathy
had become among the finest women pistol shooters in the world.
Discordant schedules squeezed the couple's time together, and diverging
interests made that time awkward.  When Kathy asked about her husband's
growing obsession with the U-boat, Chatterton told her, "I'm being
tested.  What I do with this U-boat is what I am as a person."

Neither Chatterton nor Kathy feared for the long-term future of the
marriage; they still loved each other and allowed each other space for
passions.  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.

At Kohler's home five miles away, the wave had already hit the boat.
For more than a year, he and his wife, Felicia, had argued over
Kohler's availability to her, their two small children, and Felicia's
ten-year-old daughter from a previous relationship.  She understood

the necessary evil that was Kohler's glass business-the company was
growing and required near-constant attention as Kohler sought to expand
it.  She had less patience, however, for Kohler's use of his remaining
free time.  He spent nearly every day of the year working the
U-Who-diving it, researching it, meeting with Chatterton, whisking off
to Washington.  He and Felicia seemed to fight every day.  Felicia told
him, "If you gave up diving our marriage would improve."  That song was
taps for Kohler.  Around Christmas 1993, he and Felicia separated.  She
moved with the children to Long Island and he took a bachelor pad on
the northeastern tip of the Jersey Shore.  He insisted on having his
kids every weekend.

For a month or two, Kohler reveled in his newfound freedom.  He dated
young lovelies, danced at nightclubs, and read his U-boat books with
impunity.  But he missed his son, Richie, daughter, Nikki, and
stepdaughter, Jennyann.  Weekend visits were not enough.  He
entertained notions of reconciliation with Felicia, but he believed she
would not consider it unless he agreed to abandon diving, which would
be the same as asking him to abandon food.  As February 1994 froze the
beaches near his apartment, he became convinced that something would
have to change, that he was not in his natural state without his kids
to chase off to school.

In late February, Chatterton and Kohler received a letter from Robert
Coppock at the Ministry of Defence.  Standing in his bathrobe and
holding a cup of coffee, Chatterton began to read:

U-869 ... was [originally] bound for the US East Coast land] allocated
a patrol area ... about 110 miles south-east of New York ...

Chatterton went numb.  U-869 was Horenburg's boat.  It was supposed to
have been ordered to Gibraltar.

U-869 ... may not have received a [new] signal ordering her to
Gibraltar ...

Chatterton's heart pounded against his rib cage.

In view of atmospheric conditions ... it is certainly possible that
Control's [new] signal ordering U-869 to the Gibraltar area was not
received by the boat ...

Now Chatterton was light-headed.

In the light, therefore, of the absence of any tangible proof that
U-869 had received Control's signal ordering her to the Gibraltar area,
[along with] the evidence of the knife and the proximity of the wreck's
position to U-869's original patrol area, I would concede that the
possibility the wreck is U-869 cannot be ignored.

Chatterton rushed to the phone and called Kohler.

"Richie, we just got an unbelievable letter from Coppock.  He dropped
an atomic bomb.  You won't believe it-"

"Slow down!"  Kohler said.  "What's it say?"

"It says this: U-869, Horenburg's boat, the one all the history books
say was sunk off Gibraltar, was originally ordered to New York.  And
not just to New York, but just south of New York, right to our wreck
site!  It says that headquarters later changed those orders to
Gibraltar.  But get this, Richie, and I quote: "It is certainly
possible that Control's signal ordering U-869 to the Gibraltar area was
not received by the boat.""

"But what about all the reports that U-869 was sunk off Gibraltar by
Allied escort ships?"  Kohler asked.

"We've seen how accurate those reports can be, haven't we?"

"This is unbelievable.  I'm stunned."

"Richie, can you conference-call Coppock from your office?  We have to
ask him to explain where he got this information."

"I'm already dialing," Kohler said.

A moment later the phone rang at Great Scotland Yard.  Coppock had only
a few minutes to talk.  He told the divers that his information had
been gleaned from reading intercepted radio messages between U-869 and
U-boat Control in Germany.  The intercepted messages and their
interpretations by American code breakers, he said, could be found in
Washington, D.C.

Chatterton and Kohler sat flabbergasted.  They had seen radio
intercepts before but had never dreamed to inspect those relating to
U-869, a boat conclusively recorded by history as having been sunk off
Gibraltar.  None of the experts to whom they had spoken-including
Coppock-had thought to do so either.

"I'm going to D.C. tomorrow to investigate," Chatterton said.  "The
whole story is there."

Kohler wanted to join Chatterton in Washington, but he was still part
of a two-man business and could not free up the time.  Instead,
Chatterton took Barb Lander, who had long been diving the U-Who and who
had shown keen interest in its history.  Chatterton promised he would
call Kohler with details as they unfolded, and took along several rolls
of quarters for pay phones to do so.

Chatterton and Lander landed first at the National Archives, where they
requested Tenth Fleet U-boat intelligence summaries starting on
December 8, 1944-the day U-869 had departed for war.  Archivists
wheeled out cartloads of documents stamped ULTRA-TOP SECRET. Chatterton
knew the word Ultra, the name for the Allied monitoring and decrypting
of Enigma, for decades after the war, few had fathomed that the Allies
had cracked Enigma and had been reading the German mail. Now Chatterton
and Lander were about to read it too.

The divers scanned the U.S. Navy's intelligence summaries.  They found
a report dated January 3, 1945.  Navy intelligence had intercepted
radio messages between U-869 and Control.  The code breakers wrote:

A U/Boat (17-869) now estimated in the central North Atlantic has been
ordered to head for a point about 70 miles southeast of the New York
approaches.

Chatterton could scarcely believe what he was reading-that would have
put U-869 directly on the wreck site.  He pressed further.  In a report
dated January 17, 1945, navy intelligence wrote:

The U/Boat heading for the New York approaches, U-869 (Neuerburg), is
presently estimated about 180 miles SSE of

Flemish Cap ... She is expected to arrive in the New York area at the
beginning of February.

Chatterton checked his crew list.  Neuerburg was U-869's commander.  He
kept reading, his heart charging into his rib cage.  In a January 25
report, navy eavesdroppers detected a communication problem between
1/-869 and Control:

One U/Boat may be south of Newfoundland heading for New York
approaches, although her location is uncertain due to a mix up in
orders and Control assumes she is heading for Gibraltar ... [But] based
on the signals she received it appears likely that U-869 is continuing
toward her original heading off New York.

"I can't believe it," Chatterton told Lander.  "They were ordered right
to our wreck site.  Control changed the orders to send the U-boat to
Gibraltar.  But it looks like U-869 never got those new orders.  She
just kept heading for New York."

"Oh, wow," Lander said, scanning the document.  "Read the rest of what
the navy says."

The CORE will begin sweeping for this U/Boat shortly prior to
proceeding against the U/Boats reporting weather in the North
Atlantic.

"The USS Core was an aircraft carrier attached to a hunter-killer
group," Chatterton said.  "The navy knew exactly where U-869 was headed
and was lying in wait for her."

Chatterton took his quarters and ran to the pay phone.  He called
Kohler and told him of his discoveries.

"Incredible," Kohler said.  "The navy sent a hunter-killer group for
U-869 but they never got her, never even spotted her-we'd know it if
they had.  U-boats didn't get away from hunter-killer groups in 1945,
John.  This Neuerburg must have been some commander."

For a moment there was silence on the line.

"We didn't find U-857 at all," Kohler finally said.  "We found
U-869."

"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 Llndiscret and USS Fowler.  Every history
book had it recorded that way.  Chatterton and Lander raced to the
Naval Historical Center and requested attack reports for the sinking of
U-869.  Minutes later they were looking at butchered history.

On February 28, 1945, the American destroyer escort USS Fowler picked
up a sonar contact in the area west of Rabat, southwest of Gibraltar.
The Fowler fired a pattern of thirteen depth charges.  Two explosions
followed and debris of an "unknown identity" was spotted on the
surface.  The Fowler fired another pattern of depth charges.  When the
smoke cleared, crewmen dragged a towel through the debris, which "had
the appearance of lumps and balls of heavy oil sludge but no samples
were recovered."  The destroyer searched the area for further evidence
of damage.  It found none.

Hours later, the French patrol craft Llndiscret attacked a sonar
contact in the same area, which "caused a large black object to break
surface and immediately sink."  The boat could not identify the object
and spotted no debris.

Navy intelligence was unimpressed with the attacks and the flimsy
evidence produced.  They graded each of the attacks "G-No Damage."

But, Chatterton could see as he read the reports, postwar assessors
soon changed the grade from "G" to "B-Probably Sunk."

"Why would they have done that?"  Lander asked.

"I've seen this before," Chatterton said.  "The postwar assessors were
scrambling to account for lost U-boats.  One of those U-boats was
U-869.  The assessors have no clue about intercepted radio
messages-that was top secret-so they don't know U-869 went to New York.
They check the German records.  The Germans believed U-869 went to
Gibraltar-they think she got the new orders to go to Gibraltar.  When
she doesn't come home, the Germans presume her lost off Gibraltar. Then
the postwar assessors see these attacks by the Fowler and Llndiscret
near Gibraltar.  They attach the attacks to U-869, change the grade
from G to B, and that settles it for them."

Chatterton ran back to the pay phone.  He told Kohler that the history
books were wrong.

"We found U-869," Kohler said.  "We found Horenburg, didn't we?"

"Horenburg was there the whole time," Chatterton said.  "Think about
it, Richie.  If there were radio problems between U-869 and Control,
Horenburg would have been the guy front and center for it.  He was the
senior radioman.  Listen, Richie, I'm out of quarters.  But I'll tell
you this: Horenburg must have been there for it all."

CHAPTER

US IS COMING BACK

Deschimag Shipyard, Bremen, Germany, January 1944

In THE chill MORNING of a new year, as ruins still smoldered in Berlin
from fresh British bombings, hundreds of young German men from
throughout the country made their way to the Deschimag shipyard in the
seaport town of Bremen to begin naval training Most brought just a
simple suitcase of clothes and perhaps a cherished photograph or
good-luck charm.  Perhaps fifty of these men were told they would be
the crew of a submarine temporarily titled W1077.  In a few days that
submarine would be commissioned as U-869.

Though only a handful of these men had previous U-boat experience, many
either had volunteered for submarine service or had been chosen for it
because of their technical skills and backgrounds.  They were a young
group-average age twenty-one, with twenty-two teenagers, including a
seventeen-year-old-and were worlds away from the crews of 1939, when
the U-bootwaffe selected only the most elite of the elite.

Among the most experienced men assigned to U-869 was
twenty-two-year-old Herbert Guschewski, a radio operator and veteran of
three war patrols, all with U-602.  Guschewski counted himself lucky to
be alive.  He had been ordered off U-602 just before its most recent
patrol; heavy U-boat casualties had created a shortage of radio
operators, and his services were needed elsewhere.  Guschewski was
heart

broken-his crewmen were his brothers, his U-boat his home.  U-602 set
sail for the Mediterranean.  It never returned.

As Guschewski unpacked that evening in Bremen, he heard a knock at his
door.

"Who is it?"  Guschewski asked.

"A fellow crewman," came the reply.

Guschewski opened the door.  A handsome man with wavy brown hair and
jack-of-spades dark eyes asked if he might come inside.  The man
introduced himself as Martin Horenburg, the Funkmeister assigned to
U-869.  He told Guschewski that he was looking forward to working with
him.

Guschewski shook Horenburg's hand, but his heart sank.  He had expected
to be the crew's most senior radio operator.  But Horenburg ranked
higher; he was a Funkmeister, or a radio master.  The men spoke briefly
before wishing each other a good night.  "At least," Guschewski thought
as he closed his door, "this fellow seems bright, capable, and
friendly.  At least Horenburg seems like a gentleman."

It would be a few days before the crew was officially assembled.  In
the meantime, several men assigned to U-869, including Guschewski and
Horenburg, hopped a cable car to the Deschimag shipyard in hopes of
glimpsing their U-boat.  Inside the gates, diesel fumes collided with
sea and fish, dusting the grounds with the perfume of maritime war. The
men asked about U-869.  A guard directed them to a dock.

And there she was.  Lean and stealthy, her cigar-shaped hull grooved
into the water at bow and stern, she appeared an eyebrow of the sea,
raised for the moment to observe the curious.  Everywhere she was
painted overcast gray, the most impossible color to see when the world
changed from light to dark or dark to light, the times when U-boats
were deadliest.  Affixed to U-869's conning tower were the Olympic
rings, the mark of a boat to be commanded by a graduate of the naval
class of 1936, the year of the Berlin games.  For a moment, Guschewski
stood awestruck before the machine.  In every way-weaponry, size,
design-it seemed superior to the Type VII on which he had previously
served.  "There is no comparison," he thought to himself.  "This is a
great boat.  This is something entirely different."

For the next two weeks, the men of U-869 joined other crews for general
instruction at the shipyard.  They would not meet the submarine's top
three officers-the commander, first officer, and chief engineer-until
the U-boat's commissioning in late January.  Until then, they could
only speculate about the men who would lead them into war.

Commissioning was scheduled for January 26, 1944.  On that day, those
assigned to U-869 dressed in formal navy uniforms and made their way to
the submarine's dock.  It was the first time the men had come together
as a crew.  An officer took attendance, calling out names: "Brizius,
Dagg, Dietmayer, Dietz ..."  until each of the crewmen had confirmed
himself present.  All the while, the crew cast their eyes to the side,
where a tall, deeply handsome man with black hair, broad shoulders, and
penetrating dark eyes was observing the proceedings.  They knew this
man to be their commander-they could see a nobility in his posture, a
certainty in the slowness of his breaths, a strength in his face's
Teutonic angles.  The men had grown up in a country wallpapered with
images of the heroic and invincible U-boat commander, a man for whom
anything was possible.  Here, in the form of twenty-six-year-old
commander Helmuth Neuerburg, that image had come to life.

The men climbed aboard the submarine and fell into rows of three on its
stern deck, their hands at their sides, standing at attention.
Commander Neuerburg looked over his men, over the water, and over
Germany.  By now, the men knew this to be Neuerburg's maiden command;
some even whispered that he had been a Luftwaffe fighter pilot before
volunteering for U-boat service.  Neuerburg began to address his men
from behind the winter garden's rail.  His speech was short and in
proper German, his voice military and exact.  He spoke just a few
words, all of them official and unemotional.  But it took no more than
these words for even a U-boat veteran like Guschewski to think, "There
is great courage and competence in this man.  You do not go against
this voice.  You do not go against this man."

After Neuerburg spoke, he gave the order to raise the ship's ensign.
When the flag reached the top, Neuerburg saluted it not with the Nazi
heil but rather in traditional military style.

"The boat is commissioned," Neuerburg announced.

And that was it.  No one presented Neuerburg with a model of the
U-boat, as had been done for Guschewski's previous commander on U-602.
No brass band played songs of joy and country.  The men simply left the
boat and returned to shore.

"We are living in a different time," Guschewski thought.

That evening, the officers and crew of L/-869 gathered for a
celebration dinner at a small guesthouse in Bremen.  Seated with
Neuerburg were his first officer, twenty-one-year-old Siegfried Brandt,
and his chief engineer, thirty-year-old Ludwig Kessler.  Guschewski
surveyed the sparse room and saw the direction of Germany.  Two years
earlier, he had attended the commissioning dinner for U-602, a raucous
feast of pork roast, dumplings, and wine, followed by a party for the
crew-officers and enlisted men alike-at Hamburg's famed Reeperbahn.
There, the men had watched a musical in specially reserved theater
seats, then lit up the town.  This night, there were no parties.  Men
ate herring and boiled potatoes at unadorned tables, and washed it down
with beer.  Conversation was reserved.

Still, Guschewski was excited.  His brother Willi had traveled to
Bremen to visit him.  Earlier that evening, Guschewski had asked the
cook if he might prepare a plate of food for Willi, one for which
Guschewski gladly would pay.  The cook obliged, and Willi joined his
brother and the other crewmen for dinner.  Neuerburg rose from his
table and approached the brothers.

"What is this man doing here?"  Neuerburg asked.

"He is my brother, sir," Guschewski answered.  "He made a special trip
from Bochum to say good-bye to me."

"He is not a member of the crew and is therefore not permitted in the
same room as the crew," Neuerburg said.  He turned to Willi.  "You must
leave immediately, sir.  You may take your dinner to a different room
in this guesthouse.  Your brother may visit you after ten P.M. Go
now."

Guschewski was stunned.  He admired commanders who followed strict
military protocol.  But he had also prayed that U-869 would be led by a
man with a heart.  As he watched his brother carry his plate of food
from the room, he believed that part of Neuerburg's character still to
be in question.

Onboard training began after U-869's commissioning.  As the men
shimmied through the sub's three deck hatches, they found themselves in
a technological wonderland.  Swarms of instruments, gauges, dials,
tubing, and wiring forested every centimeter of the boat.  Everywhere,
the boat smelled of fresh paint and oil and promise.  The clocks, as
the men had heard, had been set to Berlin time and would remain so no
matter where in the world the U-boat traveled.  Not a single photo-not
of Hitler or of Donitz-hung anywhere in the boat.

The men spent the next several days loading the submarine and becoming
accustomed to U-boat protocol.  No one was expected to salute officers
aboard the vessel.  Officers addressed one another by first name.  In a
matter of days, even as the U-boat still remained in port, a bond began
to form between crewmen, each of whom likely sensed what Donitz had
written years before: that a U-boat crew was a Schicksalsgemeinschaft-a
community bound by fate.

From the start, the crew studied Neuerburg.  Whatever the task, he
remained cool and restrained, the picture of military discipline.  The
men listened for him to make jokes as they walked through the officers'
mess, but they only heard him engaging a serious conversation with
Brandt and Kessler, and always in proper German.  He used no slang for
the U-boat's equipment and uttered no profanities.  Even as news of
Germany s worsening fate trickled into Bremen, Neuerburg betrayed no
fear or hesitation.  Instead, he spoke of duty, and when he did not
speak of duty he acted and stood and moved as if it were his guiding
principle.  Though naval officers had to yield membership in a
political party while on active duty-including the Nazi Party-the
crewmen observed Neuerburg's intensity and wondered if his heart might
not belong to the National Socialists.  No one, however, wondered about
his commitment.  As he took them through the first weeks of training,
they sensed that this was a man who would die before he disobeyed an
order.

For all the crew believed about Neuerburg's character, they knew almost
nothing about his life.  He had flown as a navy pilot-that much he had
told them-and had only recently transferred to the U-boat service. Some
crewmen speculated that perhaps Neuerburg had joined the U-boats to
treat a "sore throat"-slang for an officer's

desire to win the Knight's Cross, which was worn around the neck-though
Neuerburg did not discuss his motivations.  Some had seen his wife, a
strikingly beautiful woman, on the grounds one day, though Neuerburg
never spoke of family.  His privacy did not undermine the men's
confidence in their commander.  But if there was a mystery among the
crew of U-869 in the early days of training, that mystery was about
the life of the man who had been chosen to lead them.

At age nineteen, Helmuth Neuerburg of Strasbourg decided to join the
marines.  The choice might have surprised those who knew him.  As a
young man, he had displayed a natural talent for the violin and a great
facility for drawing caricatures, several of which lampooned the adults
in his life.  He had passed his Abitur, a prerequisite for higher
study.  Those closest to him expected that he might pursue a career in
the arts.  This was likely Helmuth's intention even as he joined the
marines; he knew that if he committed to a few years of service, the
military would pay him a lump sum upon discharge, money he could then
invest in his higher education.  He never considered joining the U-boat
force.  As boys, he and his older brother, Friedhelm, had talked about
submarines, but neither of them had been awed by the legend.  "There is
a big price behind that stardom," they'd reminded each other.  "You
become a victim very fast in a U-boat."

And so Helmuth became a naval cadet, class of 1936.  (The student's
class was designated by year of enrollment, not year of graduation.) He
scored high in most subjects, posting his best marks one year in
machinery and English.  He formed a band while in the service and, as
graduation neared, composed a class song, for which he was given a
special award by Erich Raeder, the head of the German navy.  Upon
graduation, he began pilot training as part of the naval air arm.  By
1940, he was an officer flying North Sea reconnaissance missions near
England, even strapping his beloved German shepherd into the cockpit
for one mission.  For the next three years, he continued to fly, to
train other pilots, and to earn excellent reviews.  But if Helmuth's
military career looked to be the National Socialist ideal, his heart
and mind told a different, more secret story.

While Helmuth did not dare speak against the Nazi regime publicly-an
officer could be executed for such a crime-he had no such reservation
when speaking to Friedhelm, a tanker in one of the army's panzer
divisions.  During visits, he told Friedhelm that he believed the Nazis
to be authoring the downfall of Germany.  Friedhelm recoiled at the
public nature of his expression.

"Are you crazy talking like that in the open?"  he asked Helmuth
whenever such conversations unfolded.  "People are listening
everywhere!  What you are saying is very dangerous!"

Helmuth continued talking.  On one occasion, after he spoke to a Nazi
official near Nuremberg, Helmuth told Friedhelm that the man's
anti-Semitic beliefs were "appalling" and "sickening."  Friedhelm
begged his brother to stay quiet.

"The walls have ears, Helmuth!"  Friedhelm warned.  "Everyone listens.
Please, be very careful with what you say.  Simply uttering such ideas
aloud can be the end of you."

In 1941, Helmuth married twenty-two-year-old Erna Maas, the daughter of
a brewery owner.  Bright, beautiful, and energetic, Erna was also
passionately antimilitary.  The two loved each other deeply.  At home,
Helmuth collected American jazz records, a music form forbidden by the
Nazis, and tuned to enemy BBC radio for news of the war-another wartime
offense.  One morning, while shaving in front of the mirror, he heard a
BBC report of America's entry into the conflict.

"We have lost this war already," he told Erna.

He continued to see Friedhelm whenever possible.  He continued talking.
"After the war I will get rid of the skirt," he told his brother,
referring to his uniform.

In 1943, Neuerburg and others were offered a choice: they could remain
with the naval air arm or join the U-boats.  Those who stayed with the
air force would go into combat immediately; those who transferred to
submarines might spend a year or more in training before going to
battle.  Neuerburg was father to a two-year-old son and a one-year-old
daughter.  He chose the U-boats, though he harbored no illusions about
their safety.  When informing Friedhelm of his decision, he said that
he believed U-boat service to be a Himmelfahrts-kommando-a command to
report directly to heaven.

Neuerburg spent the next twenty-one months in U-boat training,

using leaves to take his two-year-old son, Jiirgen, for sailboat rides
and bounce his infant daughter, Jutta, on his knee.  Just before
U-869's commissioning, he spoke to Friedhelm.  This time, he mentioned
nothing of the Nazis.  He simply looked his brother in the eye and
said, "I'm not coming back."

Classroom instruction complete, the U-boat loaded with food and
supplies, the crew of U-869 pushed out of Bremen in late January 1944
and steered to the Baltic Sea for several months of training.  From
this point forward, there would be no true home base; instruction would
be on board the boat, with stops at various Baltic ports.

By now, word of Black May-the month in 1943 when Allied forces
destroyed forty-four U-boats-had trickled down even to the enlisted
men.  Dockworkers whispered about the scores of U-boats that never
returned from patrol.  Rumors of Allied technological superiority
wafted through the naval barracks.  Though few spoke of it, the crew of
U-869 almost certainly knew that the world had shifted for U-boat
men.

Early training on U-869 included testing of the sub's underwater
noisiness, the repair of its periscope, and practice with its
antiaircraft gun.  (While U-869 had been built without a deck gun for
engaging enemy warships, it retained its antiaircraft weapon.) They
practiced "roll training," the complex art of turning and diving, until
the men were so sick of it-and so good at it-that they believed they
could maneuver the 250-foot U-boat through a creek.  Some on board
vomited until their innards acclimated to underwater life.  Others took
sick from diesel fumes and noise.  Experienced men like Guschewski knew
that the worst was still to come.

The men used February to get to know their jobs and one another.
Torpedo operators generally socialized with torpedo operators,
machinists with machinists.  In the radio room, Guschewski and
Horenburg groomed two Oberfunkmaate, or radiomen, one of whom was
eighteen years old, the other nineteen.  Though Guschewski still felt a
bit wounded that Horenburg outranked him, he found him to be an
excellent radioman and a personable fellow.  Be

fore long, the two had become synchronized in their teamwork, one
coding Neuerburg's messages and the other transmitting them.  They also
became friends.

In addition to his other duties, the radioman played phonograph and
radio music for the crew.  One day while in port, Guschewski found a
wonderful radio station playing Glenn Miller music, the kind he knew
the crew loved.  He turned up the volume.  Feet began tapping and
fingers snapping.  Then, without warning, a radio announcer interrupted
the music and said, "One of your U-boats recently left on patrol and
two days later it went missing.  We found body parts and pieces of the
wreck.  In a few days we will know the names of the commander and
crew."  Guschewski lunged for the radio dial-he knew this to be Radio
Calais, a British-run propaganda station designed to wage psychological
warfare on the Germans.  As Guschewski cut the sound, Neuerburg stormed
into the radio room from his quarters across the hall.

"Are you crazy?"  Neuerburg exploded.  "You are listening to an enemy
radio station!  The entire crew heard this!  How can you possibly do
this?"  "I tuned it in because the music was good," Suschewski
answered. "By the time I realized what was happening, the message was
out."

"I will tell you this," Neuerburg fumed.  "You will not do this a
second time."

Neuerburg turned and returned to his quarters.  Horenburg drew close to
Guschewski and rubbed his shoulder.

"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."

If Neuerburg struck his men as strict and unyielding, few seemed to
resent him for it.  Each day in the Baltic added to the crew's
appreciation for the dangers they would face in battle, and as their
imminent war patrol drew nearer they found themselves watching
Neuerburg-anticipating his moves, learning his instincts, studying his
eyes for the kind of courage that could inoculate nearly sixty

men as depth charges exploded around them and enemy airplanes attacked.
Few could deny that in their commander they saw a sculpture of might,
right, and duty, a man who demanded excellence not just that his crew
might survive, but because he believed that this was the way a man
should live.

While Neuerburg commanded respect and even a measure of fear, his first
officer, twenty-one-year-old Siegfried Brandt, was growing beloved by
the crew.  In many ways, Brandt was Neuer-burg's opposite.  He was
small of stature, perhaps five foot seven, with deeply warm and quiet
eyes, and a measured voice flecked with humor.  He nearly always seemed
to be smiling.  In a U-boat culture that shunned close personal
relationships between officers and crewmen, Brandt seemed most in his
element among the enlisted men, joking with them while on bridge watch,
asking important questions about their families and girlfriends and
hometowns, listening to fears and concerns they were officially not
permitted to have.  While Brandt was fully conversant in military
protocol, he rarely insisted on it during downtime, preferring the
meaningful conversation and sense of brotherhood that resulted when
soldiers believed they could exhale beside superiors.  Once, when
Guschewski told a popular joke about a blowhard military officer,
Brandt laughed so hard that Guschewski and the others present believed
he might pass out.  When he caught his breath, he begged, "Oh, please
repeat that!  I've never heard that one before!"  Guschewski told it
again, all the while thinking, "I would never dare tell this joke to
Neuerburg."

While Brandt seemed at ease among the enlisted men, he undertook his
duties with a palpable gravity.  The first officer arranged the boat's
bridge watches, kept the sub's torpedoes primed and ready, and directed
all torpedo attacks made while surfaced.  If the commander died or
became incapacitated, the first officer would assume command of the
submarine.  A good first officer was often rewarded with command of his
own U-boat.  In his work, Brandt demanded an unrelenting excellence of
himself, and by example rather than voice he asked the same of the
crew.  Perhaps more than anyone, Neuerburg appreciated such dedication
and competence.  In planning or conversation, the two officers seemed
in sync and of

a single mind.  If Neuerburg had reservations about his first officer's
closeness to the men, he betrayed them to no one, so that as the weeks
passed, many of the crew came to feel close to Brandt, and many
wondered about the life of a twenty-one-year-old man who seemed ready
to bear the fears of so many.  None could have imagined that Brandt,
with his easy smile and ready comfort, considered himself to be
training in an iron coffin.

Even before he joined the marines, young Siegfried Brandt of Zinten,
East Prussia, was known in his town as an "aufrechter Mensch"-a
genuinely good person.  "Siggi," as he was called, had been raised an
observant Protestant and a constant gentleman, the eldest of three
brothers born to parents open to the world of new ideas and different
people.  The family believed strongly in their religion, which stood
starkly opposed to the Nazi faith in the Thousand-Year Reich.  When the
Brandts walked to church the Nazis poked fun at their faith and
reminded Siegfried's father, Otto, that on Sundays Siggi was also
required to, attend Hitler Youth leadership meetings.  Otto told his
son, "You may go to your leadership three times a month, but on the
last Sunday, you go only to church."  The instruction infuriated local
Nazi Party members, who might have imprisoned Otto for such insolence
had he not served Germany so nobly-and so obviously-in World War I.
Otto had lost his left leg fighting for his country.  He still had a
wound in his chest.

During high school, Siggi and his two best friends had sworn an oath-an
odd and even risky pact at a time of crescendoing Nazi power.  From
this point forward, they vowed, they would conduct themselves according
to Prussian principles: discipline, order, honesty, tolerance,
reliability, and loyalty.  Those things, and not any other ideology,
would guide the rest of their lives.  As Siggi's high school graduation
drew near and Germany prepared for war, the Nazis became even less
patient with the Brandts.  The family continued to worship at their
church.  Otto had refused party membership.  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.  She held firm.  The tension between the
Nazis and the Brandts grew hotter.

After high school, Siggi volunteered for the navy.  In 1941, he began
his naval officer training.  During his visits home, Siggi's youngest
brother, Hans-Georg, eavesdropped and heard Siggi making jokes about
"Adolf-sarcastic snips about how Hitler is "the greatest" and how
Hitler "knows everything" and how Hitler "knows more about the navy
than the admirals."  Even at eleven, Hans-Georg knew that his brother
neither liked nor trusted Hitler.

For a time, Siggi served aboard a minesweeper.  Twice he saw battle
action, the second occasion resulting in the sinking of the boat and
requiring him to swim to safety.  Later, when naval brass asked for
volunteers for the U-boat service, the young Brandt raised his hand.

In February 1943, Brandt's submarine-U-108-was bombed by onrushing
British airplanes and destroyers in the Atlantic west of Gibraltar, its
conning tower severely damaged, its ability to dive erased.  Crippled,
the U-boat limped along the surface toward a base in Lorient, France, a
sitting duck for enemy aircraft or ships that happened into the
vicinity.  The sub made it safely back to port, but the experience left
a deep impression on Brandt.  During the attack, he had begged the
commander to dive, but the man had chosen to wait.  As the enemy bore
down, Brandt observed the commander looking at photographs of his
children, an example of how U-boat combat could paralyze even the
finest officer's nerves.

During home leaves, Brandt and his friend Fritz played their jazz and
swing and talked about the hopelessness of the war.  They continued to
crack wise about Hitler and to question his leadership and
decision-making abilities.  If anything, since becoming an officer,
Brandt had grown even more scornful of Hitler.  Increasingly, however,
he seemed resigned to the idea that he and so many others in the
military were just cogs in a massive machine.

< Brandt spent much of the rest of 1943 in U-boat training.  Around
this time, his brother Norbert-the one the Nazis had threatened to
sterilize-joined the army.  Zinten's Nazi Party members continued to
harass Otto and Elise over their church worship and their refusal to
join the party, despite the fact that Siggi was a U-boat officer.
Always, the threat of deportation to a concentration camp loomed over
the Brandt household.

Around October 1943, Brandt was made first officer of U-869, a
brand-new Type IX being built at the Deschimag yard in Bremen.  He met
the boat's commander, Helmuth Neuerburg, and its chief engineer, a
vaguely melancholy man named Ludwig Kessler.  During training, Brandt
was the consummate professional, duty-bound and willing to die for
Germany.  During his visits home, he referred to U-869 as a "Nazi
Tauchboot"-a Nazi diving boat-his emphasis on the word Nazi sarcastic
and derogatory.  Sometimes, thirteen-year-old Hans-Georg heard his
brother call the U-boat an "iron coffin."

The U-869 crew continued its training into spring 1944, anxious for the
first of several tests by inspectors-called the -Agru-Front"near the
Polish fishing peninsula of Hela.  At sea, First Officer Brandt took
one of three watches, while Commander Neuerburg joined any of the
watches that he pleased.  The two men appeared strong and experienced
to their men, though Neuerburg continued to struggle to squeeze his
tall frame and broad shoulders through the narrow deck hatch that led
to the control room.

U-869 would go through Agru-Front testing five times between late March
and October.  Each time Neuerburg performed excellently, controlling
his boat and firing his torpedoes with a marksmans precision.  Deadly
aim with torpedoes inspired confidence in a U-boat crew, and as the men
of U-869 watched Neuerburg kill practice targets, their belief in him
as a leader deepened.  In alarm, or emergency, dive training, the crew
was quick and nimble, a single organism of unified reflexes built from
relentless training and a sober understanding of the odds they faced.
In every phase of the Agru-Front, Neuerburg betrayed not a sliver of
fear or apprehension.  Like the famed U-boat aces who had become legend
by casu

ally perusing a novel as depth charges exploded around their subs,
Neuerburg stayed cool no matter how threatening the moment.  His crew
grew to respect him even more.

Despite their growing proficiency and cohesion as a unit, the men of
U-869 remained realists.  They knew that only a handful of them had
previous U-boat experience.  Most knew or suspected that the Allies
owned antisubmarine technology for which the Kriegsmarine had no
answer.  While Guschewski and the U-602 crew had laughed often in 1942,
he found little levity aboard U-869.  Monte Cassino had fallen.  The
Allies had landed at Normandy.  Crewmen's hometowns were being bombed.
Scores of U-boats went missing or killed in enemy waters.  Germany, it
was clear to many, was falling.

None, however, dared speak openly of his fears.  A soldier who
criticized Hitler or the war effort could be charged with
Wehrkraftzersetzung-the undermining of military authority-and tried
before a war tribunal.  No one knew exactly whom to trust.  If
Guschewski witnessed no joking among the men of U-869, he also saw none
of the quarreling of his earlier service aboard U-602, none of the
screaming matches when men became frustrated or claustrophobic on that
boat.  Somber and sober, the men of U-869 kept mostly to themselves.
Sadly, to Guschewski's eyes, no one bickered with anyone.

Early in the summer of 1944, while docked in Gotenhafen, Neuerburg
arranged an onboard celebration for his crew.  Women were not invited.
Brandt and Chief Engineer Kessler were sent ashore.  Hard liquor,
schnapps, and beer flowed freely aboard the submarine.  Excellent foods
were served.  Popular music played on the boat's loudspeakers.  Before
long, many crewmen were drunk.  All the while, Neuerburg took not so
much as a sip.  He just watched the men, studying their behavior,
listening for their opinions.  Though inebriated, the crew seemed to
whiff the idea of the party: Neuerburg was testing them, feeling for
each man's breaking point, waiting for any sign of disloyalty to him
or, some likely thought, to the Nazi Party.  Near his radio room,
Guschewski drank slowly and thought, "This is unfair.  This is not the
way to test men."  None of the crewmen said a derogatory word.  None of
them expressed

doubts.  As the party ended, Guschewski thought, "Brandt would not test
his crew like this.  The two men are opposites."

Neuerburg's celebration party caused some crewmen to further
contemplate his Nazi Party allegiance.  Though officers were forbidden
to hold party membership, Neuerburg appeared so duty-bound and
committed to formal procedure that it would have surprised few if it
had turned out that he had Nazi sympathies.

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.

If Neuerburg now seemed even more difficult to read, an incident in
Hela only furthered the enigma.  As the crew prepared to spend the
night, Neuerburg announced that they would walk to a special barracks
set in the thick woods of the peninsula.  Inside, Neuerburg served
Stark-Bier, a good and strong beer, and asked the men to gather their
chairs in a circle.  Inside the circle, he took a guitar, sat down, and
began playing beautifully, an event that astounded the crew-no one had
known of his musical talent.  Neuerburg motioned for the men to join
him in singing these lightly patriotic songs.  Some sang along.  Others
only pretended.  None questioned his motives.  They could see by the
way he sang and by the way he looked to no one in particular as he
strummed the guitar that the music came from his heart.  At eleven
P.M."  Neuerburg and the crew returned to their regular barracks.

One of the crewmen who had likely sung along that night was
nineteen-year-old torpedoman Franz Nedel.  Nedel nurtured two loyalties
as he trained with U-869.  The first was to Hitler and the Nazi Party.
The second was to his fiancee, Gisela Engelmann, whose name he had
written on one of the forward torpedo-tube hatches, and who despised
Hitler and the Nazis as much as her beloved Franz admired them.

Nedel and Gisela had met in 1940 while she was attending a Hitler Youth
program in the countryside and he was pursuing an apprenticeship as a
butcher.  He was fifteen, she fourteen.  They loved each other
straightaway.  He delighted in her freethinking, fiery personality, and
outgoing instinct.  She adored his intellect-he seemed smart beyond his
years, a thinker-and reveled in his compassion, his belly laugh, and
even the way he spoke High German with the distinctive rolled r of his
hometown region near Stettin.  She was overwhelmed by Nedel's mastery
of the butcher's craft; he oversaw the slaughter of animals with a
confidence and equanimity she'd never seen in boys from her native
Berlin.  Inside a week they were boyfriend and girlfriend.  He called
her Gila.  She called him Frenza.  They knew they would spend their
lives together.

The couple was inseparable.  When he played accordion in the band he
had formed with friends, she sang along and crowds would gather, and as
they played their favorite song, a French tune with the lyrics "Come
back home, Zurich, come back; / I'm waiting for you; You are all my
happiness," she believed that there was only one true love in a
person's life, and that she had found that love in

Nedel.

Nedel's gentle nature, however, seemed at odds with one of his
passions.  He was fascinated by U-boats.  He spoke of them constantly,
promising to enlist in the submarine service when the inevitable day
came for him to join the military.  Gila begged him to reconsider.

"These are swimming coffins," she told him.  "Get on a battleship or a
cruiser.  Get on anything besides the U-boat."

"No, Gila," he replied time and again.  "I want the U-boat."  Gila told
him she understood.  She had a shakier grasp, however, on Nedel's
political beliefs.  The Nazis had imprisoned his father, a butcher, for
holding anti-Hitler beliefs.  Nedel did not speak much about his
father's ordeal, but his mother told Gila that her husband had been
locked up for a considerable time before being released.  Nedel loved
his father.  Still, he found himself sympathetic to Hitler and the rise
of the Third Reich.

Gila's father also had been arrested by the Nazis.  For months, he had
delivered food and supplies to a Jewish family hiding in a nearby
basement.  In 1942, the Gestapo discovered the family.  They hung the
man by his feet from the ceiling, poured freezing water on him, and
screamed, "Who is helping you?"  When the man could take no more, he
revealed that it was Gila's father who had hidden his family.  The
Gestapo took the man to Gila's house, where he pointed out her father
and said, "I am so sorry.  I could not take it any longer."  Gila's
father was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where he
remained even as Gila and Nedel were falling more deeply in love.  When
Gila asked her boyfriend how he could sympathize with the Nazis after
such treatment of both their fathers, he could only say, "I am very
sorry this has happened, Gila."

Still, Gila loved Nedel deeply.  He was kind and gentle to her, and
envisioned a lovely future for them.  As Nedel entered naval training
in 1943, the couple became engaged.  "I will take care of anything we
need," he promised.  "When the war ends, we will have our life, I
promise you."

That year, as Nedel left for horn-during leave from basic training,
Gila waited for him at his mother's home.  There, she saw a photograph
of Hitler hanging on the wall.  She exploded.  "Good God, you have his
picture up!"  she exclaimed.

Before Nedel's mother could react, Gila took the photo from its frame
and clawed out Hitler's eyes with her fingers.  Then she placed the
ruined photo in her fiance's bed.

"Oh, my God, what is he going to do when he comes home and sees that?"
Nedel's mother asked.

"I want him to see that!  Leave it there!"  Gila said.

When Nedel returned home, he discovered the mutilated photo.

"How can you do that?"  he yelled at his fiancee.  "How can you poke
out Hitler's eyes?"

"Hitler is a Schweinehund!"  she screamed.

They argued louder.  Nedel defended Hitler and the Reich.  Gila could
not abide the opinion.  The argument ended the same as the others. They
still loved each other.

A few days later, after Nedel had returned to training, Berlin
sustained a massive British bombing.  When the explosions ended, Gila

found a photo of Hitler and began to climb one of the large gas
lanterns that lit the street.  At the top, she hung the picture, a
symbol of Hitler overseeing the devastation of Germany.  She began
cursing his name.  A policeman arrived and warned her that the Gestapo
was on its way.

"Go ahead and rage, Gisela," he said.  "You have fifteen more minutes
to curse up and down.  Any more and they will pick you up."

"You pig!"  Gila screamed.  "You already picked up my father.  Now
you're going to have me picked up, too?"

"Fifteen minutes," he said.

Less than a year later, Nedel was aboard L/-869.  He told Gila that he
admired Commander Neuerburg and trusted the sub's crew with his life.
"When we're out at sea, all we have is each other," he said.

Baltic training continued into summer's dog days.  At night, U-869's
crew were permitted to leave the barracks and spend their free time
about the town.  In happier days, U-boat crews had enjoyed
near-celebrity status during their off-duty hours, guests of honor at
the liveliest nightclubs, desired dance partners for the area's
prettiest ladies.  Now U-869's crew found many of the bars and
nightclubs shuttered.  Few felt like dancing, anyway.  Only beer was
available to numb the men's worries.  When the crew happened upon a
band playing in a cafe, they sat quietly in their uniforms and
listened.

That summer, First Officer Brandt took a short leave to visit his
family in Zinten.  He played with his thirteen-year-old brother,
Hans-Georg, then enjoyed his mother's turkey and bacon and eggs.  As
the evening settled, he and his father went into the study and closed
the door.  Hans-Georg tiptoed to the room and pressed his ear against
the keyhole.

"I am taking a pistol with me on U-869's patrol," Brandt told his
father.  "I will not wait until the end should something happen."

Hans-Georg's heart pounded.  What did his brother mean by saying he
would "not wait until the end"?  Their religion prohibited the taking
of one's own life.  Still, Siggi had said he would not wait until the
end.  Hans-Georg strained to hear more.

"I can tell you this," Brandt continued.  "I can fully count on each

and every one of my men.  From the youngest enlistee to Commander
Neuerburg, every man aboard U-869 is truly my comrade."

At the leave's end, Brandt dressed in his military uniform and kissed
his brother and parents good-bye.  Before walking out the door, he sat
at the piano.  He played his favorite song, "La Paloma," a longing
sailor's lament with the words "Good-bye, my dove."  His mother bit her
lip and asked him to stop.  The family members hugged one another.  A
moment later, Brandt disappeared down the street on his way back to

U-869.

A short time later, Brandt invited Hans-Georg and his mother to visit
the U-boat in Pillau, where it was stationed for training.  Hans-Georg
could barely contain himself during the train ride; soon he would see a
real, battle-ready U-boat, and one on which his brother was an officer!
At the harbor, Brandt picked up his mother and brother in a small boat
and took them to a back port where the warships were docked.  As the
boat approached, Hans-Georg picked out U-869 right away, a massive,
miraculous sculpture of gray fighting technology, brand-new and proud
and invincible, the Olympic rings standing sentinel on the U-boat's
^conning tower to protect his brother from everything.

Brandt invited Hans-Georg to board the U-boat, meanwhile apologizing to
his mother; Commander Neuerburg did not permit women on his submarine,
as he considered their presence aboard bad luck.  If she would not mind
waiting, he would give Hans-Georg a tour.  She smiled and agreed.
Hans-Georg's heart pounded.  "This is the greatest moment in my life,"
he thought to himself.  "None of my schoolmates has a brother like
mine."

The Brandt brothers walked across a rickety wooden gangway to the
U-boat.  When they reached its deck, Hans-Georg saw a man dressed in
shorts and with a scarf around his neck lying on his back, sunning
himself.  The man saw the Brandts and rose.  Hans-Georg bowed, as was
proper for a young man of the day.  The man reached and shook
Hans-Georg's hand.

"Ah, this is Brandt Junior!"  he exclaimed.

"Commander Neuerburg, this is my brother Hans-Georg," Brandt said.
"With your permission, I would like to show him the boat."

"Of course," Neuerburg said.  "We are honored to have him as our
guest."

Hans-Georg stood wide-eyed.  All his life, he'd known that U-boat men
were special, and that U-boat commanders were the most special of all.
Now he had met a commander who was tall, handsome, and powerful, and as
he walked with his brother across the deck, he knew he was living a
truly amazing day, a day when he'd seen a U-boat commander standing on
board his submarine in shorts.

The Brandts climbed through the conning tower down a smooth, freshly
painted metal ladder.  Inside, Hans-Georg stood mesmerized by the
thickets of technology that grew from the walls and ceilings of the
boat-could anyone possibly know the function of all these machines?
Brandt began the tour.  Hans-Georg knew not to touch anything.  Brandt
showed his brother the diesel engines, the electric motors, the radio
room, the torpedoes.  Everything smelled of oil.  Brandt pointed
Hans-Georg to his bunk.  The boy looked at him as if to ask, "May I?"
Brandt nodded.  A moment later, Hans-Georg was sitting on his brother's
bed.

At the base of the conning tower, Brandt showed his brother the
periscope.

"You can look through it," he told Hans-Georg.

The younger Brandt white-knuckled the periscope's handles and pressed
his face to the lens.  Before him, he saw the harbor's warships, so
close that he could read their names, and as he stared at these ships
his brother told him exactly what he was looking at; he knew the name
of every warship in the sea.  Even though this was a U-boat destined
for war, even though Hans-Georg knew his brother would be leaving soon,
he felt safe with Siggi standing behind him.

"No one," he thought, "has a brother like mine."

On August 30, 1944, U-869 was docked at the U-boat flotilla base at
Stettin.  Already, much of the town lay ruined from Allied bombing.
That night, the crewmen were awakened in their barracks by the sound of
air-raid sirens.  Some dove into underground bunkers.  Others,
including Guschewski, remained in bed, presuming that the approaching
airplanes would bypass Stettin.  But when

Guschewski heard antiaircraft fire from German ships, he knew the
attack was intended for them.  He leaped from his bed and rushed toward
the bunker.  On his way, he noticed that a few men remained in the
adjoining barracks.  He flung open their door.

"People!  Get out!"  he yelled.  "This attack is meant for us!"
Guschewski could hear the bombs falling.  He ran for the underground
bunker but found its door closed.  He beat on it with all his might.  A
fellow crewman opened the door, and Guschewski jumped in.  Bombs
exploded.  The crewmen waited inside the bunker.  When it was safe to
emerge, the men surveyed the area.  Craters lay where their barracks
had stood.  One of U-869's crewmen had been killed in the attack.  At
the bottom of one of the craters, Neuerburg and Horenburg sifted
through charred corpses.  As the men climbed out of the crater, the
crewmen bowed their heads.  Guschewski looked at his commander and at
the crew.  No one said anything, but he could read their thoughts. Each
of them, he believed, was thinking, "The war is lost.  Why isn't there
peace?"

The fall season gave the crew a reprieve from the searing summer
temperatures, which could reach 110 degrees inside the U-boat.  It
would now be just a matter of weeks before the boat was assigned a war
patrol.  In October, however, a scandal hit the submarine.

At night, while U-869 was anchored and most men slept ashore, someone
stole a large slice of ham from one of the several large hams stored
onboard.  When the cook discovered the theft, he alerted Neuerburg, who
summoned the crew.  Stealing from comrades-Kameradendiebstahl-was rare
aboard a U-boat and was a grave offense in this community bound by
fate.  Neuerburg raged before the crew.

"I cannot assure you that I will not press charges for this theft," he
yelled.

For a minute, no one moved.  Then twenty-four-year-old machinist mate
Fritz Dagg stepped forward.  "I do not want anyone wrongly accused," he
said.  "I stole the ham."

Neuerburg motioned Dagg to his quarters.  The crew dreaded the
punishment Neuerburg was certain to impose on the well-liked Dagg.  A
few minutes later, Dagg emerged from Neuerburg's quarters.  Neuerburg
had not punished him.  Instead, the commander

told the crew to go about its business.  The boat exhaled.  Guschewski
admired the decision.  He believed Neuerburg appreciated that Dagg felt
sick about the theft, and he also knew that Dagg-an excellent
crewman-could not perform properly if further embarrassed.  The men
welcomed Dagg back to the fold.  No one was angry with him.  The war
was growing more hopeless, but at least everyone had enough to eat.

By late October, U-869's crew knew that its maiden war patrol was just
a week or two away.  Brandt took a one-day leave to visit his family in
Zinten.  His father gathered the family in the living room and prayed.
Siegfried was dressed in his full officer's uniform-he had not even
brought along a change of clothes.  Snow fell thick outside the window.
Otto Brandt asked for peace and the safe return of his sons Siegfried
and Norbert.  He asked for a time like the one that now seemed from
another life, a time when his family could eat and sing and wake up at
ease together.

Brandt returned to U-869.  He was entitled to several more days of home
leave.  Instead, he gave his remaining share to married crewmen so that
they might spend more time with their families.  While these men were
away, he sat in his tiny bunk aboard the sub and wrote letters to his
family.

"I learned yesterday," Brandt wrote in one such letter, "that Fritz C,
the radioman with whom I always met, did not return from his first war
patrol.  It was his first deployment at the front.  Just a few weeks
ago we sat together in a restaurant.  That's life-hard and
inexorable."

In mid-November, he enclosed two small photos of himself along with a
short note that asked his family, "Please think of me."  In one photo,
he was seated and asleep on the deck of U-869, his knees tucked into
his chest, his back against the ship, his head bowed forward.  Though
his mother owned many photos of Siegfried, this was the only one that
made her cry.  When Hans-Georg asked why she wept at this picture, she
told him that it was the way Siggi was sitting-it reminded her of a
child, a baby, and even though Siggi was a proud warrior, she could
still see her little boy in that picture.  In late November, Brandt
sent another letter to his family.  It read:

By the time you receive my letter I will already have started my
journey.... I am so glad I heard from Norbert-this way I have
certainty.  I wish Hans-Georg a happy birthday.  I hope to be back home
for his confirmation.  I also wish all of you a merry and blessed and
healthy Christmas and New Year.  Christmas is a family celebration;
even if this time it is only in my thoughts.  By thinking of each other
we can remember how nice it used to be.  Please don't forget me as you
fold your hands, as we carry each other, let us look forward to our
"Wiedersehen."

As Brandt wrote his letters and U-869 prepared for its maiden war
patrol, Neuerburg made a final visit home.  He had joined the U-boats
for just such opportunities and since 1943 had made the most of them.
Upon returning home he always removed his uniform and changed into
civilian clothes, in order to turn back into a "Mensch"-a human being.
Often he took his three-year-old son, Jurgen, sailing with him, towing
him behind the boat in a safety ring and allowing him to pretend to be
captain of the ship.  On other occasions-to his wife's horror and his
son's delight-he placed Jurgen in a small wagon attached to his
bicycle, then pedaled as fast as he could.  He loved to photograph
Jurgen and his year-old daughter, Jutta, and he sent one of Jiirgen's
shots to a baby-powder company for advertising consideration.  At
night, he and Erna, who had spent much of their marriage separated by
his training, listened to music, talked, and fell more deeply in love.
He never discussed training or the upcoming mission, except to say that
U-869 was manned by a fine and cohesive crew and that he admired First
Officer Siegfried Brandt, not just for his professionalism but for the
way in which he had become friend and comrade to the men.  As he and
Erna counted down the days until the U-boat's first patrol, they added
entries to their "Baby Daybook," a diary they kept for Jurgen and
Jutta.  His final entry, written to Jurgen before U-869 left on patrol,
concluded this way:

A few days ago, mean "Tommy" [the English] dropped a lot of bombs and
it was very loud.  You were very quiet and you hid your little head
under Mommy's coat.  Jutta used to laugh during explosions but she too
was very still.  It was a terrible night and as you said, many houses
were destroyed.  In our house too there was a terrible mess.  Since
then you don't like to sleep alone and you want to go nighty-night with
Mommy.  Even you, my little rascal, are becoming aware of this terrible
war.

Soon, Daddy will have to go out to sea with his U-boat, and our most
ardent hope is that we will all see each other again soon, in good
health and in peaceful times.  Then hopefully you will again wait for
me with Mommy and Jutta and cry out in a happy voice: "Mommy, there
comes Daddy!"

May this time not be very far away.  May a protecting hand keep you my
dear ones from terrible things, protect and shield you till a sunny and
carefree time reunites us again.  Then the sun will shine again on you,
my children, and especially on your parents who live only with and for
you and indescribable happiness will make our life again worth
living.

With much love, Daddy

In mid-November, U-869 stood just days away from her war patrol.  As
was customary, the crew created an insignia and motto as an emblem for
the boat.  Perhaps inspired by the movie Snow White, which the crewmen
had recently seen together, they chose as their motto "Heigh-ho!," then
wrote the words over a drawing of a horseshoe and the number 869.
Beneath it, they inscribed a lyric from a popular song by the Swedish
singer Zarah Leander.  It read, "I know one day that a miracle will
happen and a thousand dreams will come true."

U-869 was scheduled to depart for war around December 1, 1944.  In the
hours before the boat was to leave, one of Neuerburg's friends, a
physician, made a quiet offer.  He would write a note to the naval
authorities stating that Neuerburg had taken sick and was too ill to
command the U-boat.  Erna urged her husband to accept the offer-she
knew the U-boats were not returning from their patrols.  Neuerburg
thanked the doctor.  He also knew that U-boats were not returning.  He
had a duty to Germany and to his men.  He refused the note.

As Neuerburg said good-bye to his family, Erna noticed that he had left
something behind.

"You have forgotten your gold pocket watch, Helmuth," she said.  "Take
it with you."

"No," Neuerburg said.  "You keep it and count the minutes until I
return home."

At around the same time, torpedoman Franz Nedel and a group of his
U-869 comrades traveled to his parents' house for a farewell party. His
fiancee, Gila, threw her arms around Nedel.  His mother went to the
kitchen to serve food and drink.  Ordinarily, Nedel and his friends
already would have been talking and singing and enjoying their free
time.  Instead, they sat in the living room, still in uniform, and
stared straight ahead, saying nothing.  Gila's smile slowly faded away
at the sight.  She looked at the men.  One of them began crying, then
another, then all of them.

"What is wrong?"  Gila asked, rushing to Nedel's side and taking his
hand.

For a moment, the men could do nothing but cry.  Nedel said nothing.
Finally, one of the other men spoke.

"None of us is coming back," he said..

"What do you mean by that?"  Gila asked.  "Of course you're coming
back."

"No, we're not coming back," said another.

The men could see Gila's face flush as she strained to contain her
tears.

"Well, Franz will come back, but none of us will," said another.  "That
makes no sense," she protested.  "If Franz comes back, you will all
come back."

The men shook their heads and kept crying.  Nedel's mother was
devastated by the sight.  Still, she pulled herself together and
stepped forward.

"Come on, boys, lie down and get a good night's sleep-you will stay
here.  Gila will stay here.  You will feel better in the morning."

The next morning, the men dressed and rode the train with En-gel mann
and Nedel's mother back to U-869's dock.  Gila did not let go of
Nedel's hand during the hours-long trip.  No one mentioned the events
of the previous night.  No one said much of anything.  At

the gate, the women were given permission to accompany the men to the
U-boat so that they might wave good-bye.  U-869 was to leave on its war
patrol that day.

To reach the submarine, the women boarded a tiny boat that took them to
a small island.  There, Gila saw U-869 for the first time-a magnificent
and proud machine in which her future lay.  Nedel took her hand.

"Gila, please wait for me," he said.  "You won't be sorry.  I will take
good care of you."

"Of course I'll wait," she said.

"Pray for me when I leave."

"Of course I will."

Gila and Nedel's mother stood near the boat.  They were joined by only
two or three other family members.  The men lined up in rows on the
U-boat's deck, just as they had during its commissioning nearly a year
ago.  A four-man band made its way to the dock and played a melancholy
German folk song.  The U-boat began to move away from its dock.  Nedel
and the other crewmen stayed on the deck and waved, though most of them
had no family or friends to wave to.  A few minutes later, the U-boat
disappeared into the overcast horizon.

CHAPTER Tu

Since 1991, Chatterton AND KOHLER had believed in history.  Every book,
expert, and document listed U-869 as sunk off Gibraltar.  Now, two and
a half years later, the intercepted radio messages between U-869 and
U-boat Control virtually proved that the New Jersey U-boat was U-869.
The divers dug deep into their filing cabinets for U-869's crew roster,
one of several dozen such lists Chatterton had copied at the U-boat
Archive in Germany.  Kohler, who understood the German rank and
position abbreviations, called Chatterton and read him the basics.

"There are fifty-six crewmen listed," Kohler said.  "A guy named
Neuerburg was the commander.  He was born in 1917, which would have
made him, what, twenty-seven years old?  The first officer was, let's
see ... Brandt, Siegfried Brandt; Christ, he was only twenty-two.
Here's our friend Horenburg, the Funkmeister, age twenty-five.  There
were four Willis aboard and three Wilhelms.  Hey, there was even a
Richard.  And a Johann.  That's like Richie and John."

"How young did they go?"  Chatterton asked.  Kohler did some
computations.

"There are twenty-four teenagers," he said.  "The youngest was Otto
Brizius.  When U-869 left on war patrol, he was seventeen."

"We've been swimming past these guys and bumping into their

bones for three seasons and never had a clue who they were," Chatterton said.  "Now we know their names."

Word of the radio intercepts flashed through the U-boat community.  To
many experts, the mystery of the New Jersey U-boat was now solved:
originally ordered to New York, the submarine had missed her rerouting
instructions to Gibraltar and had continued on to New Jersey, where she
had sunk.

Chatterton and Kohler also believed the mystery to be solved.  But they
were not prepared to close the book on U-869.  The wreck still had not
surrendered evidence that conclusively proved her identity.  The most
ornery skeptics might still argue that the U-Who was, in fact, U-857,
as the divers had earlier theorized; U-857 had, after all, gone
missing on the American East Coast and remained unaccounted for.  They
could argue that Horenburg's knife had been stolen or misplaced and had
ended up on U-857 as that submarine lay tied up near U-869 in Norway
before its battle patrols.  However unlikely this scenario, it
presented a sobering reality for Chatterton and Kohler.  Until, say, a
tag marked U-869 or a builder's plaque engraved with a hull number was
recovered from the U-boat, no one could conclude with absolute
certainty that the wreck was U-869.

Chatterton and Kohler made a decision.  They would return to the
wreck.

Their fellow divers recoiled at the idea.  Three men had died diving
the U-boat.  Others had come close.  No accessible areas remained to be
explored.

"You guys know it's U-869," their colleagues protested.  "No one's
disputing it.  You rewrote history.  Why risk your lives?"

Chatterton and Kohler responded identically: We need to know for
ourselves.

To Chatterton, quitting the U-Who now would have been tantamount to
quitting himself.  For years, he had lived and dived according to a
single set of principles, a belief that hard work, perseverance,
thoroughness, preparation, creativity, and vision made the diver and
the man.  He had overlaid his life philosophy onto scuba and had become
one of the world's great wreck divers.  He had overlaid his diving
ethos onto his daily existence and found himself leading an honorable
and gratifying life.  He could not walk away from the U-Who just short
of certain.

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.  Like Chatterton,
he was now certain that the U-Who was U-869.  But he could not announce
to the Neuerburg or Brandt or Horenburg families that he was "pretty
sure" their brothers and sons died off New Jersey, that U-869 had
"probably" sunk in American waters rather than off Africa.  He, too,
penciled in summer dates to dive the U-Who.  He could not leave
question marks hanging over these men any more than he'd been able to
accept seeing dead bodies left behind in the water during his boyhood
boating trips with his father.  He would search for a tag or some other
indisputable proof.  He would give the dead their rest and the families
their names.

A final motivation drove Chatterton and Kohler back to the U-Who, one
upon which they agreed to the last detail.  They were making history,
and they intended to do it correctly.  Time and again during their
research, they had been astonished to discover that historians had been
mistaken, books fallible, experts wrong.  The U-Who was their chance to
personally imprint history.  They would not do it in a less than
perfect way.

As spring signaled the start of the 1994 dive season, Chatterton set
his mind to breaking new ground on the U-Who.  The previous season had
been the divers' most productive, yielding excellent artifacts and
access to unexplored areas.  But it had also left Chatterton at a loss.
Every accessible compartment on the submarine had been combed over
several times.  Every idea about where to find an identifying tag or
marking had been tested.  He drew blueprints on coffee-shop napkins but
found their lines identical to those he had sketched in 1991.  He
recommitted to seeing order in garb aged piles of randomness, but he
could not envision fresh territory inside the sub in which to use this
skill.  April, traditionally a month of optimism and anticipation for
Chatterton, began to darken for his inability to conceive a new plan.
Every so often at night, while his wife slept beside him, Chatterton
would lie on his back and stare at the ceiling and wonder why his
art-this way of seeing a wreck in ways others could not fathom-was
failing him when he needed it most.

Those were the times Kohler seemed divinely sent.  Chatterton would
hear the phone ring or receive a fax or see the Fox Glass truck in his
driveway, and it would be Kohler-pushing, cajoling, stroking,
insisting, wisps of disgust blended into his thickening Brooklyn accent
as he cocked an eyebrow at Chatterton's lament.

"Look, John," Kohler would say.  "I don't mean to be impolite or
nothing, but I gotta ask: What the hell is wrong with you?  What's
happening to you?  Nothing stops us!  We're the guys!  I'll go to the
U-boat today.  It's April.  It's forty goddamned degrees and I'll go.
And I'll drag your ass down there and we'll think of a plan while we're
hanging on the anchor line if we have to.  Someone's gonna pull a tag
from that wreck.  You wanna sit here and cry while one of Bielenda's
boys does it?  You wanna watch some greenhorn get it stuck to his fin
and come out and be the guy?  We're going to do it.  We're the guys."

"Thanks, Richie," Chatterton would say.  "You're exactly what I need
right now."  Then Chatterton would reach for a pen and a napkin and
start another blueprint.

As the Atlantic warmed itself, Kohler's longing for his family
deepened.  He had never fully appreciated the depth of pleasure he took
in full-time fatherhood, nor the undergirding importance of that role
to his self-image.  For years, he had considered himself a diver.  Now,
as his children began to know a new life and new adult figures in their
new home, Kohler realized that he considered himself a father most of
all.  "I can't live without my kids," he told himself.  "I love my kids
more than diving.  I love my kids more than anything.  I'll do anything
to get them back."

Kohler began to contemplate the impossible.  He called Chatterton. They
met at Scotty's.  Kohler stared into his martini glass and told
Chatterton that any reconciliation with Felicia would require him to
give up diving.  Chatterton glared.

"Ultimatums don't work," Chatterton said.  "Marriages don't work when
one person says, "You and I will be fine together as long as you do
what I say' She wants you to give up diving?  That alone shows that
Felicia doesn't understand what you're made of.  Diving is in your
soul.  How do you 'agree' to give up your soul?"

"It's for my family," Kohler said.  "If I have to give up diving to
save my family, I'll do it."

"That's great, Richie," Chatterton said, his face reddening.  "You're
on the verge of putting the final pieces of the U-boat puzzle together,
and you're going to walk away."

"If I leave diving, I know it's going to affect you, too."

"Forget about me!"  Chatterton exploded.  "Being a diver is who you
are."

For a minute, neither man spoke.

"This is a long road, John," Kohler said finally.  "I love my kids.
They're already learning to live without me.  I gotta really think this
through."

Chatterton began to hear from Kohler less often.  In those moments of
doubt when Chatterton could not contemplate where to go next on the
U-boat, those moments when Kohler had always seemed to materialize and
light a fire under him, now there was silence.  At his office late one
summer night, Kohler sat at his desk and pulled out a loaded
nine-millimeter pistol.  He was a diver; it was who he was.  He needed
his children and his family.  He was a father; it was who he was.  He
put his finger on the trigger and drew the gun closer.  A million
images sped through his brain like a film that had come loose from the
projector's sprockets.  Should-he shoot himself in the temple or the
mouth?  He was a diver; it was who he was.  Would it hurt?  A man needs
his family.  Children should know their father.  He lifted the gun.  He
looked at a photo of his children on the corner of his desk.  If he
killed himself, they would grow up with only Felicia's account of who
he was-a one-sided account.  They would never really know him, and his
bloody head would just be proof of what she inevitably would tell them,
that Daddy was a loser who'd left his family.  He looked deeper into
the photo.  I want to smell my daughter's hair.  I want to teach my son
to ride a minibike.  I miss them.  He put the gun back in the drawer.

A short time later Kohler called Felicia.  He told her he wanted his
family back.  She gave him two ultimatums.  First, he would have to
join her for marriage counseling.  Second, he would have to give up
diving.

He told Chatterton the news that night at Scotty's.  Kohler had never
seen his friend so disgusted.

"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?"

"I'm walking away from diving."

"It's not you, Richie.  It's a big, goddamned, colossal mistake."

Kohler stared into his martini.  Chatterton had become one of his best
friends.  But this night he thought, "John is not the gentlest person
on these issues."

A month later, Kohler and his family reconciled and rented a house in
suburban Middletown, New Jersey.  At his office, across from the desk
at which he had contemplated taking his life, he packed his U-boat
work-the research, photos, documents, theories, artifacts,
correspondence, translations-into a file cabinet and locked the drawer.
He did not call Chatterton to tell him this part.  That day, Kohler
began his new life as an ex-diver.

Chatterton's first trip to the U-Who in 1994 was booked for the first
weekend in July.  He had spent months wrestling with a single question:
Where do I go next on the wreck?  On the eve of the dive, he still had
no answer.  Every accessible inch of the submarine had been searched.
Some divers and observers had begun to whisper that no one would ever
pull proof of the U-boat's identity from the wreck.  Others insisted
that a lucky greenhorn would find a tag stuck to the side of his face
mask.  Such talk was maddening to Chatterton, yet he found himself
unable to make a convincing counter argument  He commanded himself to
be creative.  Nothing happened.  He forced himself to write a list of
ideas.  Each was the same as in previous seasons.  When friends saw the
distress in his face and asked of his well-being, he could only reply,
"I'm not myself.  I'm out of ideas."

The July trip to the U-Who was as Chatterton expected.  He rolled off
the boat without a plan.  He swam the wreck without priorities.  He
looked at the periscope for the builder's plaque-just as he had done
three years earlier.  Topside, he listened for Kohler to light the fire
under his ass, to hear Kohler call him a pussy in just the right way,
but Kohler was a hundred miles away with his family and

a locked file cabinet and the boat sounded silent that day.  He told
Yurga, "Without a vision, I'm wasting my time."

As if to exact revenge against the U-Who, Chatterton turned his
creative fury to the hunt for other shipwrecks.  In July 1994 alone, he
discovered and identified the tanker Norness-the first ship sunk by a
U-boat on the American side of the Atlantic during World War II-and
discovered the Sebastian-a World War I-era passenger liner sunk by fire
and storm eight miles east of the Andrea Doria.

While Chatterton made these historic discoveries, Kohler undertook a
dry-docked life in suburbia.  He had resolved to repair his family so
that he would never again face the prospect of losing his children.  He
tiptoed around Felicia, screwed up enthusiasm for family grocery trips,
tried not to say "This is bullshit" during their marriage counseling.
He bought his-and-her bicycles.  Summoning facial muscles he'd never
known he owned, he smiled as Felicia announced vacation plans to Disney
World.  Occasionally, he would slip.  Pushing a baby stroller on a calm
and sunny Sunday, he might remark, "I bet the ocean's like glass for
those guys today."

"I don't want to hear that!"  Felicia would say, stopping and glaring.
"You're dreaming about diving?  Don't you want to be with us?"

"Of course I do, honey," Kohler would say.  Then he would keep walking
and repeat his silent mantra.  "I'm disgusted and I'm angry, but it's
for the kids.  It's for the kids.  I love my family.  It's for the kids
..."

In the beginning, Chatterton called regularly.

"Richie, I'm going to the U-boat.  You in?"

"Nah, I can't commit," Kohler would answer.

"What do you mean you can't commit?  Richie, this is insane.  You can't
live like this."

Kohler's insides were shredding.  But he would only say, "I'm sorry,
John."  When he got word that weather kept blowing out Chatterton's
U-boat trips, he found himself feeling guilty for his sense of
relief.

Kohler steeled his resolve and stayed out of diving.  Between the
cracks, he drip-fed his passions.  He continued to hoard catalogs from
the military book clubs, buying every volume that touched remotely on
U-boats, cupping the phone receiver to surreptitiously

check inventory with book dealers who knew his appetites.  He bought a
U-boat video game that contained a bonus wall map of the German naval
grids, then compared that map to the handmade version he had fashioned
from his research in Washington.  Among his biggest thrills in 1994 was
the closeness with which he found these maps to match.

Kohler expected the onset of fall to provide some respite from his
longings.  Instead, he found himself thinking about the U-Who's
crewmen.  For years, he had envisioned the horror of their final
moments-the explosion, singed bodies flung upside down, an ocean
rushing in.  Now that he knew their names, he began to imagine their
lives.  He pictured Germany as his father had when listening to Mr.
Segal's stories-a land not of goose-stepping soldiers but of families
and girlfriends, hometowns, regional delicacies, and plans.  He read
the crew list and wondered who among the men liked movies and who liked
music, whether they rooted for local soccer clubs, if any had written
his girlfriend's name on a torpedo-tube hatch.  He could imagine their
lives even to the final hours-a can of peaches awarded to the boat's
checkers champion, the cook burning sausages, the radioman playing a
phonograph record.

As winter crawled over New Jersey, these thoughts became an obligation
to Kohler.  More than ever he believed that he owed these men a duty,
that they must not lie in an anonymous grave with their fate unknown to
their loved ones.  And it occurred to Kohler that he likely remained
the last person in the world inclined to identify these men.  Yet he
was unable to move, bound by his own family obligations, and it struck
him as strange that his commitment to his family was the very promise
preventing him from doing right by the crewmen's families.  Kohler
watched the snow fall outside his rented home.  For years, snow had
meant that Kohler was just a few months from returning to the ocean.
This year, he felt like he had never been further from himself, and the
snow seemed as if it would keep falling forever.

In early 1995, Chatterton and Kohler met for dinner, but this time it
was at a pizza joint, not Scotty's.  In previous years, when the men

were themselves, their dinners had lasted for hours.  This night, it
lasted a slice.

"You staying out this year, too?"  Chatterton asked.  i "Yeah," Kohler
replied.  "I gotta stick with this.  Felicia's driving me crazy, but I
gotta see this through for the kids."

"Uh-huh."

"Any trademark Chatterton breakthroughs on the U-Who~?"

"It's all I think about.  I have no ideas.  I'm blind."

"What about the other divers?  What's their direction?"  - "Richie, no
one wants to go there anymore."

At home, Kohler was white-knuckling his marriage just to keep it
breathing.  He had entered marriage counseling, rented a house, locked
away his dive gear.  Still, the fights grew worse.  In the early spring
of 1995, he wrote Felicia a twelve-page letter, took off his wedding
band, then stuffed his clothes and belongings into a dozen Hefty
Steel-Saks and moved onto his friend's floor in Levittown,
Pennsylvania.  He was nearly bankrupt from the spending that had been
required to repair his family.

For a few months, Kohler took custody of his kids every weekend,
summoning just enough strength to shave and gefoff the floor so that
his five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter would believe Daddy was
doing great.  That lasted a few months.  In July 1995, Kohler took over
custody of the children.  He was ecstatic.  He called a real estate
agent and requested a home in the best school district within a
twenty-five-mile radius of his Trenton, New Jersey, shop.  Two weeks
later, he and his children moved to a town house in Yard-ley
Pennsylvania.  He hired an au pair, registered his kids in school,
scrounged up money for decorations for their rooms, and laid down
family rules.

On the other side of New Jersey, bad weather limited Chatterton to just
a single U-Who trip.  As in 1994, he dove the submarine without a plan
and came up empty.  Stonewalled by the U-boat, he threw the entirety of
his creative muscle into the quest he had started the previous
year-nothing less than the discovery of several historic,
undiscoverable shipwrecks.

He picked up his work on the SS Carolina, a passenger liner sunk by
U-boat gunfire during World War I. To East Coast wreck divers,

there was no greater prize than the Carolina, a beautiful vessel from
which one hundred ninety-seven passengers and one hundred seventeen
crew had been ordered into lifeboats sixty miles offshore before U-151
sank the ship.  Thirteen drowned when their lifeboat capsized
overnight.  Divers had spent decades searching for the Carolina, all to
no avail-she remained the only undiscovered passenger liner in New
York-New Jersey waters.  Chatterton spent the off-season translating
and studying German records, interviewing a shipyard archivist, poring
over the captain's log, examining seventy-seven-year-old weather
charts.  He then assembled his research and put together a vision.  He
believed the Carolina lay in an area no diver had suspected.

On his first trip to the site, Chatterton found a wreck.  He cleared
sea anemones from the fantail, where his research indicated he would
find the ship's name.  There, he began to uncover brass
letters-C-A-R-O-L-I-N-A.  In a single day, he had found and identified
the SS Carolina, for decades the most coveted prize among Northeast
wreck divers.

A few weeks later, Chatterton made a trip to a wreck that some
suspected was the freighter Texel, another ship sunk by a U-boat during
World War I. Chatterton devised a plan based on his study of Texel
photographs and deck plans: he would search the bow area for reference
points like portholes that he knew to be positioned near the ship's
name.  Legendary diver Gary Gentile assured him that the bow was too
busted up to yield the name.  Chatterton went anyway.  He found the
brass letters.  They spelled Texel.  In the course of a year,
Chatterton had discovered and/or identified four historic shipwrecks.
Some began to call him the greatest wreck diver in the world.  He sank
further into despair.

Chatterton redoubled his efforts to crack the U-Who.  He drew blanks.
Ideas flowed into his head for other projects, mosaics of imagination,
perseverance, and vision that promised discovery in whatever he
fancied-except for the U-Who.  At conferences at which he was asked to
speak about diving the Lusitania or the Carolina or his other recent
accomplishments, people invariably asked about the U-boat, a subject so
depressing to Chatterton that he stopped attending these events.

For the first time in his career, Chatterton heard the clock tick.  He
was forty-three years old, already an elder statesman in a sport that
wore down athletes half his age.  Divers no longer wanted to explore
the U-Who.  If Chatterton got bent or broke bones in a car accident or
developed cancer, the submarine likely never would be identified.  Then
the casual and the lazy would simply waltz in and proclaim it U-869.
"We're virtually certain of it," they would announce-nightmare words to
an artist.

Yet Chatterton was at a loss as to what to do next.  Nightly, he lay
awake in bed, telling the ceiling and the heavens that he would do
anything to pull proof from the wreck, that he would help anyone who
had an idea, that he would share his knowledge, that he would risk his
life inside that U-boat if only he could conceive a vision.  Friends
like Yurga told him, "You've gotta cut yourself a break.  You've done
more in the last year than most great wreck divers do in a lifetime."

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."
When he thought that, Chatterton would snap out of his brush with
quitting, sit down at his desk in front of Horenburg's knife, and start
drawing sketches of the places on the U-Who he planned to go next.

Now separated from Felicia, Kohler began to receive invitations to go
diving.  The first came from Chatterton.  Kohler told him what he would
tell all his friends that season: "I can't dive.  I physically and
mentally can't do it.  My head's not in it.  I'll die."

As the 1995 dive season wound down, Kohler continued as a full-time
father and businessman.  He slept irregularly, running to mid

night emergency business calls and making French toast for his kids
when he returned.  His children settled into a routine.

In September 1995, Kohler went to the Hudson City Savings Bank to do a
glass job.  There he met a very pretty, thirty-year-old blue-eyed
blonde who complained of a problem door.  When Kohler deduced that part
of the problem was that the woman had been kicking the door with her
high heels, he took a liking to her.  The woman, Valentina Marks,
looked a bit indignant at Kohler's bemusement  That made him like her
more.  He asked her to dinner.  It went well.  He asked her to dinner
again.  It was the real thing.

Kohler told her about the U-Who, and she leaned into his conversation
and asked to know more, especially about the fallen crewmen.  Tina was
of German descent.  She attended Oktoberfest in Germany every year with
her father.  Even before Kohler confessed it, she knew he felt an
obligation to these men.

In Tina's house or in the park or even on the phone, she would lie on
her back, close her eyes, and ask Kohler to describe the details of the
things in life that moved him, a process she called "painting colors."
Often, Kohler painted a trip to the U-Who, from the moment the Seeker
pushed away from its dock to the feeling of gliding down the anchor
line to moving respectfully past the crewmen's remains.  Kohler told
her of finding a skull and then replacing it so that the dead crewman
might look out over his comrades, and Marks understood why he'd done
it.  She painted colors for him, scenes of Germany and the Black Forest
and Neuschwanstein Castle, and of affection for her own German heritage
and family.  They watched Das Boot together and she remained on the
edge of her seat for the entire movie.  He told her about the intensity
of his commitment to diving.  She said she believed that everyone
needed a room of one's own.  As the months passed, Kohler began to
paint colors of making a future together with Tina.

In late 1995, Kohler received the same phone call he had placed two
years earlier.  It was from Chatterton; his marriage was in trouble.
They met at Scotty's.  Chatterton's situation was different from
Kohler's.  Though he and Kathy were fighting, there had been no
suggestion that Chatterton give up diving.  The couple had simply grown
apart.  Each had a passion-Chatterton's was diving; Kathy's
was pistol shooting-and each had become increasingly devoted to that
passion.  Over the years, the marriage had evolved into an arrangement
of convenience.  He understood currents, and the flow of the marriage
was moving away from him.

"Maybe the worst part," he told Kohler, "is that the U-boat is hanging
over me.  It's with me at work and home.  I take a step back and look
at myself and I'm not who I used to be.  I'm not as friendly.  I'm not
as happy."

"John, you have so much to be happy about," Kohler said.  "You just had
one of the greatest diving years in history.  In two summers you
conquered the world.  In two summers you discovered the universe of
shipwrecks while guys like Bielenda barked at the moon.  How can you be
unhappy at a time like this?"

"The U-boat is different," Chatterton said.  "The U-boat is our
moment."

For several minutes, neither man said anything.  Finally, Chatterton
spoke.

"You coming back, Richie?"  he asked.

"I just don't know," Kohler said.  "It's been a very long time."

Kohler spent the winter of 1995-96 contemplating a future with Tina.
His life had stabilized, his kids were happy, and his business was
growing.  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.  Kohler unlocked the
storage shed at his shop.  He picked up his dry suit.  The trademark
red by which other divers knew him from across the Horrible Inn's
parking lot was as bright as it had been the day he and Chatterton
first dove the U-Who together.  He walked to the phone and dialed.
Chatterton answered.

"John, it's Richie," he said.  "I'm back."

The divers met at Scotty's.  Chatterton had never seen Kohler so
alive.

"You've done worlds of stuff over the last two years," Kohler said. "I,
on the other hand, have done shit.  But I've got one big advantage on
you, John.  I'm back with a vengeance.  I'm a madman two years in the making.  You're out of ideas?  You don't know where to turn
next?  Let me tell you this: we're not stopping until we solve this
thing.  The proof is on that wreck, I know that in my heart."

Kohler reached into his briefcase and pulled out his long-entombed
U-Who file.  The divers began work on a plan.  Their approach was
primitive and ferocious.  They would force their way into the electric
motor room, the only unexplored compartment aboard the U-Who.  That
room and part of the adjoining diesel motor room remained blocked by a
steel escape trunk, the vertical tunnel through which crewmen could
escape a flooding or sinking boat.  For years, the divers had figured
the trunk to be unmovable, the electric motor room to contain nothing
but machinery.  Now they vowed to move the trunk at whatever risk and
whatever cost.  And it would no longer be good enough to presume that
the electric motor room contained no identifying artifacts; they were
going to bash their way in and see for themselves.  The divers finished
their dinners and shook hands.  For two years, each of them had been
removed from himself.  Now reunited, the first draft of a plan secured
on a napkin, they looked to be exactly where they were meant to be.

The plan took shape like this: Chatterton and Kohler would rig a
three-ton chain fall to the escape trunk, which blocked the aft end of
the diesel motor room.  The chain fall, a heavy-duty, ratchet-driven
hoist, was powerful enough to pull a car from a ditch.  Divers almost
never risked a move like this, even in shallow waters, as the dangers
were myriad.  The trunk could collapse on the divers, crushing or
pinning them.  The trunk could splinter, shooting shrapnel in all
directions.  The divers could become irreversibly winded by the
physical exertion necessary to rig and move the trunk.  The grated
floor on which the divers would anchor themselves could cave in.  The
U-boat itself might collapse once the trunk was pulled free.  The trunk
could fall and block the divers' exit.  Chatterton and Kohler discussed
these possibilities.  They considered each of them real.  They decided
to proceed.

Chatterton borrowed a chain fall from the commercial diving outfit for
which he worked.  The divers booked several trips.  Time and again,
however, inclement weather forced them to stay onshore.  The entire
1996 season passed.  If this audacious plan was to happen, it would
have to wait until 1997.

The winter passed slowly for both men.  The diving appetites Kohler had
suppressed for two years now roared in his daily life, yet he was
helpless to do anything but wait until the weather warmed. Chatterton's
marriage continued to fossilize.  His wife had taken a new job, further
reducing their time together.  They entered counseling. It didn't work.
In May 1997, as the dive season began, they hired a divorce lawyer,
though they agreed to continue living together until the fall, when
each of their summer activities would subside.

The death knell of Chatterton's marriage broadsided him.  One spring
day, he called Kohler and said, "I've got to see you now."  Kohler left
work and met his friend at the Watchung Reservation, where they walked
by a waterfall and through some woods.  Chatterton needed to know how
Kohler had dealt with his pain, how he had managed to show up to work
every day as his family was disintegrating.  He asked detailed
questions about heartache.  Kohler mostly listened.  He told Chatterton
that he believed that time healed nearly everything, but he said little
else.  He knew that Chatterton needed to talk and to be around someone
who loved him and cared about him, and Kohler did.

As New Jersey's charter boat captains put their boats back in the water
for the 1997 dive season, Chatterton and Kohler reviewed one of Henry
Keatts's books on wreck diving.  In one chapter, they came across
photographs of several tags that had been recovered from U-853-a World
War II U-boat of exactly the same type as the U-Who-located near Block
Island, Rhode Island.  Most of the tags were generic and contained no
meaningful writing.  One of them, however, stunned the divers.  It
read, U-853.  Chatterton and Kohler had recovered dozens of tags from
the U-Who.  None of them was marked with anything like this kind of
identifying information.

Kohler rushed to the phone and called Keatts, whom the divers knew
casually.

"Hank, in your book there's a photo of a bunch of tags from U-853.
Where on the submarine did those tags come from?"

"I'm not sure," Keatts said.

"Where are the tags now?  Who has the one that says U-853?"

"I think Billy Palmer pulled that tag."

"Thank you very much," Kohler said.

Billy Palmer was a hard-living, cigar-chomping, fiftyish captain who
ran a small dive boat, Thunderfish, near Block Island.  He was also a
first-rate wreck diver.  Chatterton and Kohler saw him every so often
at the Boston Sea Rover show, and they had some friends in common.
Kohler found Palmer's Connecticut home phone number and placed a
call.

"You still have those tags from the 853?"  Kohler asked.

"I got buckets of tags," Palmer said.

"Buckets?"

"Yeah, buckets."

"You happen to remember where you got the one that says U-853?"

"It's been a long time, Richie.  My memory's a little cloudy."

Kohler asked if he and Chatterton might drive up for a visit.  Palmer
told them he'd be happy to see them.

A day later, the divers knocked on Palmer's door.  He answered wearing
an authentic Iron Cross award on a chain around his neck, one of the
artifacts he had recovered from U-853.  Chatterton and Kohler glanced
at each other as if to say, "Is he serious with that Iron Cross?"  but
made no comment.  Palmer gave them a guided tour of his house, much of
which was filled with artifacts.  The divers were itching to see the
tags.  Palmer took his time.  Finally, he escorted them to his
basement.  There, dressed in a German sailor's uniform, complete with
hat and coat, and standing beside a ship's helm, was a female mannequin
Palmer introduced as "Eva."  Palmer passed out beers.

"So you're interested in the tags?"  Palmer asked.

"Yes, very much," Chatterton replied.

Palmer lifted the glass on a display case.  Inside were at least fifty
plastic tags.  One of them was stamped U-853.  The divers sat
dumbstruck.

"Can you tell us where on the wreck you found this one?"  Kohler
asked.

Palmer turned away from the divers and toward the mannequin.  "Eva," he
said calmly, "steer course zero-two-zero."

The divers studied Palmer's face.  They could not tell if he was
serious in addressing Eva.  Palmer smiled pleasantly, the Iron Cross
dangling against his shirt, and returned to the conversation.

"It was on a wooden spare-parts box, a little bigger than a shoe box,"
Palmer said.

"In what room?"  Chatterton asked.

"It was in the electric motor room."

The divers nearly leaped from their chairs.

1 "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."

Chatterton and Kohler sat frozen.  Of all the places on the U-Who, the
electric motor room was the only one that remained inaccessible, and
the only one in which they had not imagined finding identifying tags.
Now more than ever it was imperative that they move the massive steel
escape trunk that blocked access to part of the diesel motor room and
the adjoining electric motor room.  They stood up and thanked Palmer.
*

"That all you fellows want?"  he asked.

They told Palmer that he had been a great help.  They glanced again at
Eva.  They told Palmer it had been a real experience, and bid the man
good-bye.

The divers booked a trip to the U-Who for June 1, 1997.  Chatterton
brought the three-ton chain fall and an aluminum support beam.  For the
first time in nearly four years, they were attacking the U-Who with a
plan.  As the Seeker neared the dive site, Chatterton and Kohler paced
the boat's rear deck.

"I'm so ready to go," Chatterton said.

"We're back," Kohler replied.

The plan would be executed in two stages.  On the first dive, Kohler
would take precise measurements of the escape trunk.  He and Chatterton
would study those figures between dives, then rig the chain fall to the
trunk and pull it out on the second dive.  If all went well, they would
have unfettered access to both motor

rooms-and hopefully spare-parts boxes marked by identifying tags.  The
weather and current waved a gentle welcome to the divers.  Chatterton
glided down the anchor line and tied the anchor into the wreck.  Kohler
followed, swimming through the gaping wound in the control room and
heading aft.  Just inside the diesel motor room, he came face-to-face
with the escape trunk, a massive steel tube that lay fallen at a
thirty-degree angle between the two giant diesel engines built on
either side of the room.  Wire splayed like Einstein's hair from all
parts of the trunk, some of it long enough to choke the life from a
diver if he drifted too close.  Kohler moved in slowly.  Though he was
supposed to measure the obstruction, he instead removed a crowbar
strapped to his tank.  When Kohler was a boy, his father had told him,
"Give me a big enough lever and I can move the world," a lesson that
suddenly took over his brain.  Kohler nudged the tool between the trunk
and the engine; perhaps the huge steel tube had a bit of give.  He
surveyed his surroundings, taking stock of how he might lunge to escape
if the trunk began to fall.  He pushed on the crowbar.  The trunk
rocked and groaned, billowing silt mushroom clouds into the compartment
and causing wire to rattlesnake toward Kohler's face mask.  Kohler went
motionless and forced his breathing down.  He was supposed to be
measuring the obstruction.  But now he was full of new ideas.  He could
muscle the trunk away.  It could cost him his life, yes; there were a
dozen ways he could die doing that.  But he had been away from himself
for too long.  He owed the fallen crewmen a duty.  He owed himself the
attempt.

He moved the crowbar again.  The trunk rocked in reply.  The visibility
was now less than a foot.  He could lift this thing.  Kohler looked
behind him for an escape route, but that hardly mattered: if the trunk
fell on him, it would pin him or strangle him or crush him through the
rotting floor, and Chatterton-who was working forward in the sub to
give Kohler space-would never hear him scream.

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.

"Don't fall backward," Kohler told the trunk.  "Don't bury me here."

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.  The floor creaked.  His arms burned.  He stepped backward.
Now, able to glimpse himself clear of the front of the engines, he
released the trunk, allowing it to plummet downward.  As it fell,
Kohler thrust the trunk away from him.  It hit the floor and crashed to
the left, raising storms of dark brown, oily silt and sounding thunder
off the U-boat's steel walls.  Kohler held his breath and looked down.
He was not trapped.  He was not dead.  He could see nothing, but he
knew he had made the biggest, most important move of his career.  He
had moved the unmovable.  The obstruction to the electric motor room
had been felled.

Kohler would have liked nothing more than to swim between the diesel
engines and into the electric motor room.  But he was winded, and the
visibility had dropped to zero.  He and Chatterton would have to wait
until the day's second dive to move in.  Kohler inched out of the
submarine.  On his way up the anchor line, he thought to himself, "This
is the day."

Topside, Kohler told Chatterton the story.  Chatterton squinted and
cocked his head.

"You did what?"

"I muscled it.  It's moved.  We're in."

"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."

"Maybe it's better if we don't analyze exactly how dangerous it was,"
Kohler said, following Chatterton into the salon.  "Here's the

important thing: three hours from now and we're into the electric motor
room."

Around noon, Chatterton and Kohler reentered the ocean carrying lift
bags and goody bags for the spare-parts boxes they hoped to recover.  A
minute later they were inside the U-Who.  The silt had cleared inside
the diesel motor room, leaving a clear view aft.  The divers could
scarcely believe what they saw.  Just a few feet past the escape trunk
Kohler had moved lay another obstruction, this one a huge,
crescent-shaped steel fuel tank that had once been bolted into the
overhead pressure hull.  Chatterton and Kohler stared at the tank,
which had obviously fallen during the U-boat's demise.  They swam
closer and inspected it.  The tank appeared to be about twelve feet
long and very heavy.  It lay wedged diagonally between the diesel
engines, with just a whisper of space between its top and the rooms
ceiling, an even more severe obstruction than the escape trunk Kohler
had just moved.  The divers knew right away that even a three-ton chain
fall could not move this mass.  They looked at each other but did not
have the energy to shake their heads.  The net profit of Kohler's
triumph had been an extra four feet of access into the diesel motor
room.  The electric motor room-the room they needed-was still a million
miles away.

The divers turned around and swam back to the anchor line.  Their heads
hung during their decompression ascents.  On board the dive boat, they
undressed in silence.  Every so often, one of them muttered an
obscenity.

For an hour during the ride back to Brielle, neither man said a word.
They just sat on a large cooler and watched the dive site disappear.
Then, as the sun set over the horizon, Chatterton turned to Kohler.

"I have a plan," he said.

"I'm listening," Kohler answered.

For the next five minutes, Chatterton described a vision, a
three-dimensional epiphany for moving past the fallen fuel tank and
into the electric motor room.  After he finished, Kohler looked him in
the eye.

"You'll die," Kohler said.

"I'm going to do it," Chatterton said.

"You'll die for sure."

"I'm going to do it.  But I can't do it without you."

"I won't be part of that.  I won't watch you die."

"I'm going to do it," Chatterton said.  "This is our last chance,
Richie.  More than I know anything, I know I'm going to do it.  And I
need you with me."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CIRCLE-RUNNbk

Kristiansand, Norway, December 4, 1944

A WEEK AND A HALF after leaving Germany, Commander Neuerburg and U-869
arrived in the southern Norwegian port town of Kristiansand, where they
took on fuel and supplies.  Brimming with provisions, the U-boat could
now wage war anywhere in the Atlantic.  Neuerburg's first assignment
was to crawl northward along the Norwegian coast, then break into the
open Atlantic via the Iceland-Faeroes gap.  He would receive further
orders-war orders-when the submarine reached the open seas.  Radio
traffic between the U-boat and Control would be kept to a minimum; by
this time in the war, even the slightest chatter from a U-boat could be
intercepted by the Allies.

On December 8, the U-boat's diesels belched to life and it pushed away
from the Norwegian U-boat base.  For three weeks, it crawled along
Norway's coast and then onward into the Atlantic, submerged virtually
nonstop to avoid Allied air patrols and ships.  On December 29, Control
radioed its next order.  U-869 was to head for naval grid CA 53, the
center of which was about 110 miles southeast of New York.  Neuerburg
had been issued perhaps the most prestigious assignment a U-boat could
receive: L/-869 had been sent to wage war against America

The U-boat pushed westward.  Protocol required Neuerburg to radio a
brief passage report to Control once U-869 broke into the open Atlantic
Control, which had been plotting U-869's presumed progress, had
expected such a report no later than December 29.  None was received. 
On December 30, Control requested a passage report.  Again, it received
none.  Control became "concerned," its officers reported in the diary,
though they did not yet take the silence to mean that U-869 had been
lost.  On January 1, 1945, Control requested a position report from
U-869, this time in strong language.  It received no reply.  It
repeated its requests.  Still it heard nothing from the submarine.  Now
Control was worried.

Control did not know why it had not heard from U-869.  Four possible
explanations must have been considered.  The first was that Neuerburg
simply refused to use his radio for fear of Allied detection.  That,
however, must have seemed unlikely, as commanders would have been loath
to ignore such urgent requests from Control.  The second was that
U-869's radio equipment was malfunctioning, making reception and/or
transmission impossible.  The third was that atmospheric problems-known
to be an issue in that area of the Atlantic-were wreaking havoc with
the radios.  The fourth was that the boat was no more.

For the next several days, and probably using increasingly urgent
terms, Control demanded position reports from U-869.  On January 3,
Control noted its "considerable anxiety" at U-869's silence.  At around
the same time, Allied intelligence studied its radio intercepts and
made this assessment: "A U/Boat (U-869) now estimated in the central
North Atlantic has been ordered to head for a point about 70 miles
southeast of the New York approaches."

By January 6, Control was likely mourning for U-869.  In almost every
case in which a U-boat was five days late in reporting to Control, that
U-boat was lost.  Still, Control beseeched U-869 to answer.  That day,
in a broadcast that must have seemed a miracle inside Control, U-869
radioed her position.  Even as Control officials celebrated they
scratched their heads.  U-869 was in naval grid AK 63, about six
hundred miles southwest of Iceland.  The U-boat, they wrote in their
diary, "should have been considerably further southwest."  It was then
that Control likely realized that Neuerburg had made a big and bold
decision, one with which they probably were not pleased.  Rather than
use the Iceland-Faeroes gap-the most direct route from Norway into the
open Atlantic-he had diverted much farther north, making a loop over
Iceland before heading southwestward through the Denmark Strait.  There
could be no doubt as to why Neuerburg had spent the extra days and fuel
going the long way: the Denmark Strait was less heavily patrolled by
Allied airplanes and ships.  Though a commander was allowed such
discretion, Control never liked the move; every extra day spent in
transit was an extra day spent away from the war.  Neuerburg's crew, on
the other hand, was likely grateful to their commanding officer.  He
had made his first major war move, and it had been in the name of
protecting his men.  What no one knew-not Neuerburg, his crew, or
Control-was that Allied code breakers had intercepted their broadcast
and knew where they were.

Neuerburg's decision to use the circuitous Denmark Strait sent Control
strategists scrambling.  They likely determined that he must have
burned at least five extra days' fuel going the long way, meaning that
it would cost the boat one hundred days to stay perhaps fourteen days
off New York, an unacceptable ratio.  Control requested a fuel-status
report.  Again, it received no reply from U-869 "in spite of continuous
queries."  As Neuerburg had showed himself willing to use the radio,
and as the radios appeared at least sometimes to be working, Control
probably blamed atmospheric conditions for the lack of communication
from U-869, Unwilling to wait any longer for a fuel-status report,
Control radioed a new order to Neuerburg: U-869 was to change course
and head to Gibraltar, to patrol the African coast.  By rerouting the
submarine away from New York and to this closer operating area, Control
could expect a longer patrol from U-869.

Control would not have expected U-869 to acknowledge receipt of this
new order-it would have been too dangerous for Neuerburg to use his
radio simply to confirm the directive.  Control therefore presumed
Neuerburg to have received the order and began plotting U-869 to
Gibraltar, calculating that the submarine should arrive there around
February 1. Had Neuerburg received the order, it is certain that he
would have followed it-while a commander had discretion in choosing his
routes, he had no such option when receiving a direct order.  Whether
because of equipment or atmospheric problems, it is virtually certain
that U-869 never received the new order to Gibraltar.  Neuerburg kept
heading for New York.

The Allies, however, were interrupting almost everything.  On January
17, their intelligence wrote, "The U/Boat heading for the New York
approaches, U-869 (Neuerburg), is presently estimated about 180 miles
SSE of Flemish Cap ... She is expected to arrive in the New York area
at the beginning of February."

On January 25, American intelligence pegged the situation: "One U/Boat
may be south of Newfoundland heading for New York approaches, although
her location is uncertain due to a mix up in orders and Control assumes
she is heading for Gibraltar."

Then, in the chillingly matter-of-fact language of war, American
intelligence announced its plans for U-869: "The CORE will begin
sweeping for this U/Boat shortly prior to proceeding against the
U/Boats reporting weather in the North Atlantic."

The Americans would be sending a hunter-killer group to destroy U-869.
They knew where the submarine was going.

All the while, Neuerburg and his crew continued their long push toward
New York.  U-boats went largely unmolested during travel in the open
Atlantic-hunter-killer groups often waited for them to arrive in
shallower waters closer to shore, where the U-boats could less easily
run and hide.  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.

U-869 likely approached American coastal waters in early February. From
that point forward, Neuerburg certainly would have kept the submarine
submerged full-time, using the snorkel for the fresh-air intake
necessary to run the diesel engines underwater.  By now, the American
hunter-killer group had begun its search for U-869. Neuerburg, who knew
well the Allies' ability to track and stalk a U-boat, must have
navigated with extreme stealth-the hunter-killer group found only
fathoms of empty sea.

Now U-869 was in American waters and bearing down on the

New York approaches.  Neuerburg's targets would be whatever enemy
vessels he could find.  The crew's nerves must have been stretched taut
against their knowledge of the odds against them.  Perhaps a day
passed, perhaps several days.  Then, through the crosshairs of the
U-boat's periscope, Neuerburg must have spotted an enemy ship.  At that
point, he would have ordered his men to their battle stations.  The men
would have remained silent.  From this point forward, every order would
have been whispered.

As U-869 crept forward at a speed of perhaps two knots, the crew likely
heard the sound of water outside the submarine, the hum of the electric
engines, and perhaps even the faint revolutions of the enemy target's
propellers in the distance.  All else would have been quiet.  Now U-869
was ready to attack.  At this moment, Neuerburg, Brandt, and the rest
of the crew knew certain things.  They knew that the war was being
lost.  They knew U-boats were not returning home.  They knew that it
was up to Neuerburg, not Control, to decide when U-869's patrol had
concluded.

No one knows what Neuerburg thought then.  He kept the periscope
raised.  The men remained at their battle stations.  Seconds later,
Neuerburg whispered this kind of order inside the steel, cigar-shaped
hull of U-869:

"Tube one ready-fire."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

AN AUDATIOUS PLAN

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 kiokboard 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 tri mix tank, and slither back out the
way he had come in.  Only by carrying a single tank of tri mix-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.

"Forget it," Kohler said by phone on the evening Chatterton revealed
the plan.  "That is the single most insane plan I have ever heard in my
life.  I'm not watching you die.  I'm not participating in your
suicide."

"This is vision," Chatterton said.  "This can work."

"This is lunacy," Kohler said.

Kohler found a notebook and began scribbling a list of risks.  Most of
them ended with the phrase "then John runs out of gas and drowns."  The
list read like this:

- Chatterton could become entangled-in wire, pipes, fittings, fixtures,
bent metal, anything.

- Chatterton could be pinned under falling debris.

- A piece of machinery could fall and block Chatterton's exit.

Relying on a single gas supply eliminates the safety of redundancy-if a
high-pressure hose or O-ring fails, Chatterton loses his sole breathing
source.

The dive's high risk will almost certainly cause Chatterton to breathe
harder than usual, meaning he will burn through his already limited gas
supply even faster.

The electric motor room will be packed with cables, wires, and
machinery no diver has seen before, meaning that Chatterton will not
have his usual chance to mentally diagram the room's layout.

There is no way out the other end of the electric motor room, as its
aft end has been crushed downward.

The water inside the electric motor room, undisturbed by divers or the
ocean, has been stagnant for fifty years.  Chatterton's activity inside
the compartment will disturb the dusty brown silt and reduce the
visibility to zero.

- Chatterton's bubbles could disturb fuel or lubrication oil floating
on the compartment's ceiling, clouding his mask, blinding him, and
seeping into his mouth.

"Any one of these can kill you," Kohler said.  "But you'll be lucky if
only one of them happens.  More likely, a bunch of them will gang up on
you and kill you even faster.  And don't forget maybe the biggest
danger, John."

"What's that?"

"You will be alone inside that compartment.  Even if I agreed to this
outrageous plan, even if I waited for you on the other side of

that obstruction, I can't help you once you get into trouble.  I can't
take my tanks off.  I've got kids.  I have mouths to feed.  The most I
can do is peer over that fuel tank and watch you drown."

"We can't stop now," Chatterton said.  "I have a plan.  This is why I
dive, Richie.  This is the art."  "It's too goddamned dangerous."  "I
need you with me."  "I'm bailing on this, John.  I'm out."

The divers hung up.  Word spread throughout the local diving community
about Chatterton's plan.  There were two schools of thought.
Chatterton's friends, including John Yurga and Danny Crowell,
pronounced Chatterton "out of his fucking mind."  Those who knew him
only in passing were more liberal: "If he wants to kill himself, let
him," they said.

For three days, Chatterton and Kohler did not speak.  Kohler envisioned
the dive from a thousand angles and it always ended up the same-with
Chatterton slumped over drowned or pinned under some piece of fallen
steel, Kohler helpless to move through the crack to save him.  But he
also found himself imagining another scene, this one of his first dive
to the U-Who.  While hanging underwater, he had been overcome with joy
at the sight of Chatterton's mesh bag filled with china, and had
reached instinctively to take a closer look.  Chatterton had snatched
the bag away-the men did not like each other then, did not like what
the other represented.  For a moment there had been a standoff.  Then
Chatterton had seemed to look into Kohler's heart.  A few seconds later
he'd offered his bag to Kohler.

Kohler called Chatterton.

"John, I'm scared to death for you," Kohler said.  "But we're partners.
I'm not going to bail on you now."

"We are partners, Richie," Chatterton replied.  "Let's do this."

The first attempt was scheduled for August 17, 1997.  Chatterton spent
the weeks leading up to the mission rehearsing his moves in his office,
in his garage, in line at the grocery store, a combination mime and
ballerina practicing for a recital in which a single misstep

would mean death.  By this time, his divorce was nearly final.  In
1991, when he'd discovered the U-Who, he had believed his marriage
would last forever.  Now Kathy did not even know of this daring plan
for the U-boat.  Some nights, he mourned the marriage so deeply he
found himself unable to move.  At those times, he told himself, "I must
put everything out of my mind for this dive.  I must focus absolutely.
If I don't, if I'm the slightest bit distracted, I won't come back."

On August 17, Chatterton, Kohler, and five other top wreck divers
boarded the Seeker and set sail for the U-Who.  No one said much during
the trip.  In the morning, Chatterton reviewed his plan with Kohler. He
would use the first dive as a trial run to get a feel for taking off
his tank, investigating the accessibility of the electric motor room,
and learning the layout of the compartment.  Kohler would hover near
the top of the fallen fuel-tank obstruction, shining his flashlight as
a beacon and waiting to take any artifacts Chatterton might pass
through.

"Let's make a three-of-anything plan," Chatterton told Kohler as he
pulled on his fins.  "If I bang my hammer three times or flash my light
three times or do anything three times, it means I'm in trouble."

"Okay, it means you're in trouble," Kohler replied.  "I still can't
squeeze through that crack in the top to help you.  So three of
anything basically means you're dead."  "Yeah, you're right.  Forget
it."

A few minutes later, Chatterton and Kohler were in the water.  In
total, Chatterton carried three gas tanks-the one he would breathe
inside the electric motor room, plus two stage bottles for his trip
down to the wreck and back.  As the divers reached the U-Who,
Chatterton placed his stage bottles on top of the wreck and began
breathing from his primary tank.

The divers swam toward the fallen fuel tank that blocked much of the
diesel motor room and the adjoining electric motor room.  Chatterton
removed the tank from his back and held it in front of him.  Kohler
ascended toward the gap between the fuel tank and the ceiling, through
which Chatterton would pass.  Chatterton kicked his fins and began
gliding up and forward.  He was now just a few

feet away from pushing his tank through the gap and igniting this crazy
plan, but he still had a moment to dip his shoulder and turn back, to
U-turn on this mystery he had all but solved already.  He never stopped
kicking.  A few seconds later, he pushed his tank through the
gap-vigilant not to let it slip-and then sardined through himself.  On
the other side of the diesel motor room, he slung the tank onto his
back.  No diver had ever been in this part of the U-Who.  He began to
explore.

The path to the electric motor room was clear.  Chatterton swam to the
rectangular hatch that led into the compartment and passed through it.
He was now floating inside the electric motor room, the place he and
Kohler believed held proof of the wreck's identity.  Chatterton felt
six years of mystery pushing him farther inside.  He talked that
instinct down.  He had done well enough on this trial run.  He had ten
minutes of gas remaining.  He would use it to become accustomed to
leaving these compartments.  He swam back up to the fallen fuel tank in
the diesel motor room and again removed his tank.  A few seconds later,
he pushed the tank and himself back through the opening near the
ceiling and landed on the other side.  From there, he reattached the
tank, glided to where his stage bottles lay atop the wreck, and
switched regulators.  He now had plenty of gas with which to do his
decompression.  Kohler shook his head in amazement.  Chatterton had
made a near-perfect trial run.

Bad weather blew out the day's second dive.  The next trip was
scheduled for August 24, 1997.  Kohler's nerves settled a bit in the
intervening week.  If Chatterton could replicate his trial dive, he
thought, the SOB.  might just be able to pull off this so-called
vision.

The plan would be the same as on the first trip, with a single
exception: Kohler would pass Chatterton a video camera once he got past
the obstruction and reaffixed his tank.  Chatterton would thus be able
to videotape the compartments for future study, if necessary.

As before, Chatterton's tank maneuvering was seamless.  The video
camera he had taken from Kohler, however, would not work.  Frustrated,
he swam to the top of the compartment to hand it back through the gap
to Kohler.  By now, however, he had reaffixed the

tank to his back, and he found that the equipment made him slightly too
bulky to reach the gap.  Chatterton spotted a massive steel beam near
the ceiling, a piece he could use to pull himself closer to Kohler.  He
grabbed the beam and pulled.  The steel shook for a moment, then gave
way, crashing into Chatterton's lap and hurling him against one of the
diesel engines.  His heart pounded.  He ordered himself to control his
breathing.  He looked at the beam-its ends had lodged in the
surrounding machinery.  Chatterton slowly reached to remove the steel
from his lap.  Its weight was enormous, at least two hundred pounds out
of water.  Still, he managed to begin lifting it.  His breathing rate
increased.  His gas supply dropped.  He lifted harder.  The beam moved
just an inch before stopping cold, the mirror image of an
amusement-park roller coaster restraint.  Chatterton pushed harder. The
gauges on his tank moved lower.  The beam would not budge. Chatterton
pushed with his legs to get free.  He could not move.  He was
trapped.

Chatterton began to talk to himself.

"Panic is how guys die," he thought.  "Take thirty seconds.  Take a
little break.  Collect yourself."

Kohler looked into the gap.  Silt had billowed everywhere.  He could
see nothing.  He presumed Chatterton was going about his dive.

"Deal with this problem," Chatterton told himself.  "Guys die because
they don't take care of the first problem.  Don't let the snowball
roll."

Chatterton's gas gauge crept downward.

"This thing got onto me," he thought.  "It's just a matter of figuring
the way it landed on me, then reversing the process.  Stay calm.  Don't
make more problems.  Just reverse the process."

Chatterton used his mind's eye to replay the collapse of the beam.  For
five minutes, he gently tried to push the steel in the opposite
direction.  The object would not move.  He continued to concentrate,
replaying the accident in his mind over and over.  Another five minutes
passed.  The object would not budge.  Primal instincts raged in
Chatterton's head, begging him to thrash and flail and scream and
lunge.  He ordered his instincts to wait.  He had five minutes of gas
to breathe.  He would watch more film.

With just a few minutes of gas remaining, Chatterton again reached to
move the beam.  There would be no more time for movies if this attempt
failed.  He pushed up and felt one end clank free.  He pushed on the
other end.  The beam collapsed forward and pivoted away from his lap.
Chatterton pushed himself off the diesel engine and swam swiftly but
not wildly toward the gap near the ceiling.  His gauge needle dipped
farther into red.  He removed his tank and pushed it through, then
kicked his fins and wriggled out of the compartment.  Kohler moved to
join his partner, but he backed off when he saw Chatterton head
directly for the tanks he had left on top of the wreck.  A moment
later, Chatterton had switched to one of his stage bottles.  The gauge
on his primary tank was near empty.  He likely had exited the diesel
motor room with less than a minute of air remaining.

Topside, Chatterton told the story.  Danny Crowell, who had captained
the boat that day, shook his head and turned to another diver.

"Any other diver in the world and we're calling the Coast Guard for a
body recovery," he said.

Kohler turned white.  He'd had no idea that Chatterton had experienced
any trouble.

"Forget it," Kohler said.  "This is too dangerous.  This whole plan was
a big mistake.  John, you gotta reconsider.  This is really bad."

"Let's get that video camera working," Chatterton said, reaching inside
a cooler for a soda.  "I'll want to shoot lots of film on my second
dive today."

Kohler walked away.

"Crazy bastard," he muttered.

A few hours later, Chatterton was back inside the diesel motor room,
Kohler hovering outside and waiting again to be helpless.  This time,
the camera worked.  Chatterton moved through the rectangular hatch that
led into the electric motor room.  A half century of silt exploded in
clouds around him.  Chatterton pointed the camera to where his research
indicated the spare-parts boxes and their identifying tags should
be-the camera could always see better than the human eye underwater.
When the visibility fell to zero, Chatterton exited the electric motor
room and swam back up toward Kohler, then passed him the camera.  He
removed his tank-a move with which he was becoming comfortable-and made
his way out of the diesel motor room.  He had not recovered any artifacts.  He had almost
lost his life on the first dive.  But now he had video.  Topside, as
the divers undressed and the boat headed back to shore, he thanked
Kohler for his support.

"Next trip and I haul the boxes," Chatterton said.  "I feel it.  The
next trip is the one."

The next charter to the U-Who was scheduled for a week later, on August
31, 1997.  Chatterton spent the intervening days studying the videotape
he had shot.  In one of the spots he saw what appeared to be a stack of
three or four boxes.  Now he really knew the next dive would be the
one.

At home, Kohler went to war with himself.  His friend and partner had
come within a minute of drowning.  Worse, on Sunday Chatterton planned
to go back in and recover the spare-parts boxes.  Kohler knew that the
electric motor room was jungled in the worst, most ravenous scream of
wires, tubes, jagged metal, and silt.  He also knew Chatterton's heart.
His friend would breathe his tank dry on Sunday before he would exit
without his answer.  His friend would die inside that wreck on
Sunday.

Kohler decided to quit.  Whatever satisfaction he might derive from
delivering an answer to the crewmen's families and to history would be
smothered by his helpless proximity to a drowning friend.

Yet whenever he picked up the phone to deliver his resignation, he
ended up putting the receiver back on its cradle.  There might be, he
thought, one scenario worse than watching his friend die in the wreck,
and as Sunday drew near he knew that worst scenario to be allowing his
friend to die while he stayed home and waited for the news.

On Saturday evening, August 30, 1997, the Seeker jockeyed away from her
dock and pointed toward the U-Who.  Chatterton and Kohler spoke little;
each knew that today was the day.

The next morning's weather was perfect and calm.  Over a bowl of
cereal, Chatterton asked Kohler if he was ready to receive the

spare-parts boxes he expected to recover and pass over the top of the
fallen fuel tank.  Kohler nodded.  An hour later, they were on the
wreck.  Chatterton took off his tank, extended it in front of him, and,
stretched horizontally like Superman, moved through the crack between
the obstruction and the ceiling.  Kohler turned on his flashlight and
lifted it to the space, a beacon for Chatterton's return.

Visibility was good inside the diesel motor room.  Chatterton
re-attached his tank and glided through the rectangular hatch that led
into the electric motor room.  The scene was just as his videotape had
depicted it.  He looked to the right.  There, stacked in a freestanding
pyramid, were four increasingly large boxes of spare parts, each fused
to the next by decades of marine encrustation and rust.  The smallest
of them was slightly larger than a shoe box.  They were exactly what
Chatterton had come for.

Chatterton inched toward the boxes.  Lying at a thirty-degree angle
against the top box was what appeared to be a five-foot-tall section of
pipe, one that had likely broken from the room's machinery and fallen
atop the box.  Chatterton pushed gently against the boxes.  The pipe
was wedged hard against them, and nothing moved.  He thrust his palms,
football lineman-style, into the stack.  Nothing.  The pipe, he could
now see, had pinned the boxes in place.  He reached for his knife and
tried prying the pipe away.  It did not budge.  Silt billowed overhead,
reducing the visibility to near zero.  Chatterton turned back and
exited the compartment.  He now understood the final element of his
plan.  He would have to take drastic action.

Topside, Chatterton briefed Kohler.

"The boxes are fused together and pinned down by this huge pipe,"
Chatterton said.  "But those are the boxes, Richie.  If there are
identifying tags on this wreck, they're on those boxes."

"That's great," Kohler said.  "But if nothing's moving, what can you
do?"

"A sledgehammer.  I'm taking a short-handled sledgehammer down there.
The boxes are mine."

Slinging a sledgehammer at 230 feet was perhaps the best way for a
diver to blow through his gas supply.  Kohler did not bother to

object.  Chatterton was on a mission being directed from somewhere
deeper than good advice.

"I'll find you the sledgehammer," Kohler said.

Chatterton and Kohler splashed four hours later.  Like pulling off a
T-shirt, Chatterton removed his single tank and pushed it, the
sledgehammer, and himself through the crack between the fallen fuel
tank and the ceiling.  Inside, he reattached his tank and swam for the
electric motor room.  Kohler noted the time on his watch.  He grumbled
a half prayer.  Several of the words were please.

Chatterton moved swiftly into the electric motor room.  The compartment
remained brown and cloudy from his earlier dive, but he could still see
the boxes and the pipe through the silt.  His approach would be simple:
he would use the sledgehammer to knock the pipe loose, then pry the
boxes free from one another with a crowbar.

Chatterton crept to within two feet of the pipe.  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.  He anchored his
left knee on the ground in front of the boxes and his right foot across
the aisle on solid machinery.  Then, in a short, violent forward
explosion, he thrust the sledgehammer's head into the section of pipe
fused to the boxes.  The compartment thundered with the impact as
pieces of encrustation flew from the pipe and hail stormed the room in
rust.  Chatterton stayed motionless.  When the pieces settled to the
bottom, he stood, amazed at the sight.  The pipe had not moved.  And
the pipe was not a pipe.  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.

"I need to make a decision," Chatterton said to himself.

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.

"If I leave now, I can leave in one piece."  He stepped forward and
found purchase with his feet.  When things are easy a -person doesn't
really learn about himself.  He spread his hands across the
sledgehammer's smooth, long handle.

It's what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that
shows him who he really is.

He lifted the sledgehammer against his chest.

Some people never get that moment.

He breathed deeper than he had ever breathed.

The U-Who is my moment.

He thrust the head of the sledgehammer toward the cap of the oxygen
tank.

What I do now is what I am ...

The sledgehammer bashed into the tank.  The room thundered.  Silt flew
everywhere.  Chatterton waited for the sound of a million sticks of
dynamite.  He heard only the whoosh of his bubbles leaving his
regulator and the clank of falling metal.  He peered through the silt.
The tank had dropped away from the boxes.  He was alive.

"Oh, Christ," he said aloud.

Chatterton moved toward the boxes, pulled the smallest one free, and
stuffed it into his mesh bag.  He checked his watch-he had five minutes
remaining.  He swam out of the electric motor room and up toward
Kohler's flashlight beam.  Though the box was heavy, he managed to
hoist it through the gap to Kohler, who passed it to another diver to
take to the surface and inspect for tags.  By all rights, Chatterton
should have exited the diesel motor room then, while he still had three
minutes of time remaining.  He could not.  It was possible that the
first box did not contain a tag.  There were other boxes inside the
electric motor room.  He needed to retrieve a second box.  Kohler
desperately flashed his light.  Chatterton turned around.

A minute later, Chatterton found the second box.  This one, however,
was even heavier than the first and could not be picked up and swum to
Kohler.  Instead, Chatterton began to roll it end over end out of the
electric motor room.  The visibility dropped to zero.  Chatterton
shined his flashlight on his gauges but could see nothing- the room had
gone entirely black.  He pushed the box farther, huffing and puffing
just to move it another foot closer to Kohler.  He pressed his watch against his face mask.  He could make out only the
vague outline of his timer.  He had already stayed longer than planned.
He abandoned the box.

"I've gotta get my ass out of here," he thought.  Chatterton swam to
the top of the electric motor room so that he could use the ceiling
topography to feel his way out of the pitch-black compartment.  His
navigation was perfect, delivering him to the hatchway that led to the
diesel motor room.  He was now just a few kicks away from Kohler.  He
swam forward.  Suddenly, his head jerked back.  A wire noose had caught
around his neck.  Chatterton was being strangled.

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.  From
his waiting post, Kohler checked his watch.  Chatterton was not just
late.  He was crazy late.

Chatterton pulled at the wire noose around his throat and managed to
muscle it off his neck.  His breathing quickened even more.  He reached
up and clawed at the cables that had snared his equipment.  Nothing
gave.  He could not move.  He tore harder at the restraints.  They
hissed in protest and would not loosen.  He pulled at them with all he
had.  Finally, they dropped away.  Now free, he dug hard for Kohler,
knowing that the slightest additional entanglement would kill him.  A
moment later he was there.  All that remained was for Chatterton to
remove his tank and swim through the gap.  He took a breath as he
reached for the tank.  Only the tiniest trickle of gas came through the
regulator.  Chatterton knew this sensation.  He was a breath from going
empty.

Chatterton ripped off his tank and shoved it through the crack near the
ceiling, then lunged through the space himself.  As he reached the
other side, he inhaled, but nothing came from his tank.  He was
entirely out of gas.

Chatterton spit the regulator from his mouth.  His only remaining hope
lay in reaching his stage bottles.  But they were outside the
compartment and on top of the wreck, a swim of at least fifty feet.  He
dared not risk buddy-breathing with Kohler, as even a slight

delay or mix-up in communications could be deadly.  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.

A few seconds later, Kohler arrived at his side.  He looked Chatterton
in the eye, then pointed to his chest, sign language for "You just gave
me a heart attack-now I'm the one who's going to die instead of you."
The divers began their long decompression hang.  For nearly two hours,
Chatterton thought only of the terrible risks he had taken during the
dive.  Often, he-said aloud, "I can't ever let that happen again."  He
had long since forgotten the spare-parts box he had recovered, which
Kohler had passed to another diver for tag inspection topside.

Near the end of their decompressions, Chatterton and Kohler saw another
diver, Will McBeth, swim down the anchor line.  McBeth handed
Chatterton a slate just like the one on which Chatterton had written
"SUB" during the discovery trip six years earlier.  This time, however,
the slate said something different.  This time, it read:

The U-Who now has a name-it is U-869.  Congratulations.

In his younger days, Kohler might have jumped for joy and slapped
Chatterton on the back.  Chatterton might have pumped his fists in
triumph.  Today, they looked into each other's eyes.  Then,
simultaneously, neither one before the other, each extended his hand.
The divers shook.  Today, they had found something important.  Today,
they had their answers.

EPILOGUE

CHATTERTON AND KOHLER identified U-869 in 1997.  To this day,
mysteries remain.  Why did U-869 continue to New York after being
rerouted to Gibraltar?  How did U-869 meet her end?  How did the crew
die?

The answers to these questions will probably never be known; the U-boat
sank with all hands and without witnesses.  It is possible, however, to
construct a most-likely-case scenario.  That scenario looks like
this:

The cataclysmic damage to U-869's control room was almost certainly
caused by a strike from its own torpedo.  U-boats such as U-869
carried two types of torpedoes in 1945.  Normal "pattern" torpedoes
were programmed to run a specific course toward their targets and used
a gyroscopic steering mechanism to get there.  Acoustic torpedoes were
more advanced, homing in on the sound of an enemy ship's propellers.
Both types of torpedoes, however, occasionally turned back on their own
U-boats.  Those torpedoes became known as circle-runners.  U-boats
recorded several instances in which circle-runners passed beneath or
above them.  An acoustic circle-runner could be especially dangerous,
as it chased the sounds of its own submarine's electric motors, pumps,
and generators.  To avoid being hit, U-boat commanders were ordered to
crash-dive immediately after firing an acoustic torpedo.

Commanders often had advance warning of circle-runners.  Torpedo
propellers spun at several hundred revolutions per minute and produced
a distinct, high-pitched whir-whine audible at great distances to the
U-boat's radioman, and then to the entire crew as the weapon drew
closer.  When a commander got such a warning, he was often able to dive
or otherwise change course to avoid the circle-runner.  History will
likely never know how many of the sixty-five still-missing U-boats met
their ends by circle-runners.  By its nature, a circle-runner gives
little warning and bears no witness.

Under ideal conditions-calm seas, good underwater sound propagation,
early detection, and fast reporting-Neuerburg might have had thirty
seconds or more to respond to the circle-runner.  In worse conditions
or if the radioman hesitated (or both), he would have had less time.

The torpedo would not have blown up instantly upon striking U-869.
Instead, there would have been perhaps a one-second delay between
contact and detonation as the pistol on the weapon's nose clicked and
triggered the explosion.  That click-an unmistakable sound to
submariners-could be heard even when a torpedo struck a distant target.
It would have sounded just long enough before detonation to register in
the awarenesses of the crewmen.

Most German torpedoes carried between 620 and 780 pounds of high
explosives.  Based on damage to the wreck, the circle-runner likely
impacted just below the conning tower, in the center of the submarine.
Men located in the boat's control-room area-including Neuerburg and
Brandt-would have been blown apart and nearly vaporized by the
explosion.  Men in adjoining rooms likely also died immediately from
the concussion or from being hurricaned into machinery.  Rippling
sheets of air pressure would have rampaged toward both ends of the
252-foot-long submarine, probably sling-shotting some crewmen off
ceilings and walls and one another, crumpling others like marionettes.
Steel doors were blown open.  So strong was the blast that it bowed the
steel hatch leading into the diesel motor room and blew the steel hatch
off the torpedo-loading tube in the forward torpedo room, the
compartment farthest from the blast's epicenter.  The force of the
explosion was easily strong enough to blow open the overhead
hatches-hatches Chatterton

and Kohler once speculated had been opened by crewmen attempting to
escape the sinking sub.

With the U-boat now open to the ocean, torrents of icy water would have
rushed inside.  A merciless process of replacing air with water in the
sub would have begun, and it would have happened with great sound and
violence.  Bodies would have been rag-dolled off machinery and other
structures.  Rushing air would have sounded and impacted like a tornado
to anyone still alive.  Machinery and parts and clothes and tools would
have flown at right angles in the furious columns of air rushing from
the sub, some of which would have been expelled as ocean debris.  No
one could have held on.  Corpses-some of them likely missing heads or
limbs-would have begun a crooked float to the surface.

It probably took the U-boat less than thirty seconds to fill with
water.  The submarine would have sunk to the ocean bottom in less than
a minute.  If anyone had survived the explosion and somehow made it out
of the boat and to the surface, he likely would not have lasted more
than an hour in the icy waters.  The enemy target ship, now as far as
ten minutes away, its own engines running, wind and water lapping at
its sides, would almost certainly have never heard or seen a thing.

The most likely explanation for the communications problems between
U-869 and Control involves atmospheric conditions, though it is
possible that the boat also experienced mechanical problems with its
radios.  Though Neuerburg might have been hesitant to broadcast for
fear of exposing his position to Allied eavesdroppers, the submarine
placed itself in no danger by receiving messages from Control.  That
U-869 continued to New York after Control ordered her to Gibraltar
makes it virtually certain that Neuerburg never got the rerouting
orders.

The fate of U-857-the submarine that had been hunting targets on the
American East Coast in April 1945 and was believed for months by
Chatterton and Kohler to be the U-Who-remains a mystery.  It is still
thought lost to unknown causes.

The Harbor Inn-a.k.a. the Horrible Inn-no longer exists.  Standing in
its place in the Brielle, New Jersey, parking lot adjacent to the
Seeker is the upscale Shipwreck Grill, which serves its nattily
dressed customers lobster bisque and honey-roasted salmon with Dijon
lobster sauce.  Older divers who drop in for a bite swear that if they
stay long enough they can still hear Bill Nagle calling for another Jim
Beam.

The Seeker, the dive boat conceived and built by Nagle and used to
discover and dive the U-Who, continues to run charters.  Its current
owner, Danny Crowell, goes to the Stolt Dagali, USS Algol, and many
other popular wrecks.  Crowell rarely runs to U-869.  "I'd go if people
were interested," he says.  "There's just not that many of those kind
of divers around these days."

A few dive boats, such as Howard Klein's Eagle's Nest and Joe
Terzuoli's John Jack, continue to take customers to U-869.  Since
Chatterton pulled the identifying tag from the wreck in 1997, however,
the U-boat has surrendered no important artifacts.  Still, Chatterton
and Kohler believe that there's a remote chance that Commander
Neuerburg's diary survived and lies buried in silt and rubble.  Were
that diary to be recovered with its writing intact, history would have
a first-person insight into the boat's doomed patrol.

The technology of deep scuba diving has evolved since Chatterton and
Kohler identified U-869.  Today, perhaps 95 percent of deep-wreck
divers breathe tri mix the blended gas believed by many in the early
1990s to be voodoo.  About half of deep-wreck divers have abandoned
their open-circuit gear-the decades-old tank-and-regulator
combination-in favor of the rebreather, a smaller, computer-controlled
device that recycles exhaled air.  Rebreathers make very deep dives
possible by obviating the need to carry several tanks of decompression
gas.  They remain, however, more unreliable than open-circuit systems.
It is thought that more than a dozen divers worldwide have died using
rebreathers.  Chatterton was one of the first to adopt the new
technology.  Kohler has stuck with his open-circuit gear.

In 1997, less than a month after he identified U-869, Chatterton and
Kathy divorced.  A year later, as a member of an elite expedition to
Greece, Chatterton became the first person ever to dive HMHS Britannic,
the sister ship to the Titanic, using a rebreather.  As part of an
October 2000 mission to the Black Sea sponsored by Yad Vashem, the
Israeli Holocaust museum, and the U.S. Holocaust

3 2 8

Memorial Museum, he searched for the Struma, an overflowing refugee
ship on which 768 people-mostly Romanian Jews-lost their lives fleeing
persecution in 1942.

In November 2000, PBS's Nova series aired Hitler's Lost Sub, a
documentary about the mystery U-boat.  The program became one of Nova's
highest-rated episodes ever.  The same month, Chatterton was diagnosed
with metastasized squamous cell carcinoma of the tonsil, likely a
result of his exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam.  He was back diving
shipwrecks by May of the next year.  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.

In January 2002, Chatterton married Carla Madrigal, his girlfriend of
three years.  The couple wed and honeymooned in Thailand, then moved to
a beachfront home on the New Jersey shore.  In September 2002,
Chatterton quit commercial diving after a twenty-year career to pursue
a history degree and teaching certificate at Kean University in Union,
New Jersey.  After graduation, he hopes to teach high school or college
history.  Chatterton and Kohler remain close friends and still dine
together at Scotty's.  By May 2003, Chatterton's cancer was in
remission.  In July 2003, he began hosting Deepsea Detectives, a
program about shipwrecks, for the History Channel.  Kohler even co
hosted on several episodes.

Chatterton's involvement with U-869 largely ended the day he identified
the wreck.  Unlike Kohler, he felt no pressing obligation to find the
crewmen's families or to deliver news of their loved ones' fates.  "I
cared about those things," Chatterton says.  "But they were in Richie's
heart.  There was no one in the world who should have done that besides
Richie."

The first person Kohler called after he and Chatterton identified U-869
was Tina Marks, his girlfriend.  She had believed in him, understood
his feelings of obligation to the crewmen and their families, and
supported his diving.  The couple grew closer.  She became pregnant.
Tina, however, was being harassed by a former boyfriend who begged her
to return to him.  She refused.  One day in 1998,

when Tina was eight months pregnant with Kohler's child, the man showed
up at her door, shot her with a nine-millimeter pistol, then shot
himself.  The police found both of them lying dead inside the
residence.  In a moment, Kohler's love and future had disappeared.

As it had for years, diving served as his salvation.  In 1999, he
became co-head of a British-American expedition to identify previously
discovered World War I and World War II U-boats sunk in the English
Channel.  Of twelve target boats, the team identified four.  In the
fall of that year, Kohler opened a second branch of Fox Glass, in
Baltimore.  His son, Richie, and daughter, Nikki, who continue to live
with him, became honor-roll students.

Kohler remains a voracious reader of history, though he says he reads
differently since his quest to identify U-869.  "In the back of my mind
I question a little of everything," Kohler says.  "To me, that makes
history even more interesting."

Kohler's involvement with U-869 entered a new phase after he and
Chatterton identified the wreck.  In 1997, he set out to find the
crewmen's families and deliver them news of their loved ones' fates.
With help from Kirk Wolfinger and Rush DeNooyer of Lone Wolf Pictures
(who directed the Nova special), and from the German media giant
Spiegel, which had begun work on a television documentary about the
divers and U-869, he found contact information for Barbara Bowling, the
half sister of Otto Brizius, at seventeen the youngest of U-869's
crewmen.  He also found Martin Horenburg's daughter.

Bowling, it turned out, had been living for nearly twenty years in
Maryland.  She and Otto shared the same father, a man who had spoken
lovingly of Otto since Barbara had been a baby.  All her life, Bowling
had grown up admiring and loving this brother she had never known,
always believing he lay at the ocean's bottom off Gibraltar.  When
Kohler visited Bowling at her home he could hardly believe his eyes.
Her son, Mac, was the image of Otto, whose Kriegsmarine photos hung
proudly in her house.  Bowling, a fluent German speaker, agreed to help
Kohler with his further search for family members.

Horenburg's daughter was less eager to speak to Kohler.  Her mother had
remarried after U-869's loss, and her stepfather had raised her as his own.  Out of respect to this man, she preferred not
to pursue contact with Kohler.  Through an intermediary, she expressed
gratitude to the divers and supplied them with several photos of her
father.  Chatterton took the knife off his desktop-a knife that had
spoken to him for seven years-carefully packed the artifact, and drove
it to the post office.  A week later, the knife belonged to Martin
Horenburg's daughter.

For a time, Kohler found himself frustrated in his efforts to locate
more families.  He focused on his personal life and began dating Carrie
Bassetti, an executive for a New Jersey pharmaceutical company and the
woman who would later become his wife.  He had met Bassetti on a
wreck-diving trip aboard the Seeker, and was moved not just by her
passion for diving, but by her innate sense of adventure and old-school
appetite for living.  By 2001, he had secured excellent contacts with
crewmen's families from his source at Spiegel.  He booked a trip to
Germany.  He needed to see these relatives in person.

Just before departing for Europe, Kohler chartered a boat and took
Bowling and her family to the wreck site.  There, he read a short
memorial he had written, then splashed into the ocean and affixed a
wreath and ribbons to U-869.  On New Year's Day 2002, accompanied by
Bowling as his translator, Kohler landed in Hamburg.  He had finally
come to do what he had needed to do for years.

Kohler's first appointment was with Hans-Georg Brandt, First Officer
Siegfried Brandt's younger brother.  Now seventy-one years old and a
retired auditor, Hans-Georg waited nervously at his son's home for
Kohler's arrival, his son and grandchildren also eager to see the face
of one of the divers who had risked his life to find Siggi.  Kohler
knocked.  Hans-Georg, dressed for the occasion in fine tan slacks, a
brown cardigan sweater, and a tie, opened the door.  For a moment, the
men just looked each other over.  Then Hans-Georg stepped forward, took
Kohler's hand, and spoke in halting English.

"I am deeply touched that you have come.  And I am so sorry for what
happened to the brave divers who lost their lives on the U-boat.
Welcome."

For six hours, Hans-Georg remembered his brother Siggi, a brother he
loved today as much as he had at thirteen when Siggi showed him the
secrets of his U-boat and allowed him to look

through its periscope out into the world.  The conversation was
emotional and painful for Hans-Georg at times.  At the day's end,
Hans-Georg thanked Kohler again and helped him find his coat.

"I brought you something," Kohler said.  He reached into his briefcase.
A moment later he produced a metal schematic he had recently recovered
from U-869's electric motor room.

"You were probably in this room when you visited your brother," Kohler
said.

Hans-Georg took the schematic and stared at the metal, at its writing
and rust.  For several minutes, he could not break his gaze from the
artifact.  Finally, he began tracing his fingers along its edges and
over its crusty surface.

"I can't believe it," he said.  "I will save this forever."

The next morning, Kohler and Bowling drove several miles outside
Hamburg to meet with a sixty-year-old surgeon.  The man, thin, tall,
and handsome, welcomed the Americans into his home.  He introduced
himself as Jiirgen Neuerburg, the son of U-869's commander, Helmuth
Neuerburg.

Jiirgen could produce no memories of his father, as he'd been just
three years old when U-869 was lost.  But he remembered well his
mothers stories, and the fondness and love with which she'd told them.
For hours, while his wife listened closely, he shared these stories
with Kohler, showing dozens of photographs and diary entries in
'between.

"Since I was a child, I believed my father had been lost off
Gibraltar," Jiirgen said.  "When I learned that divers had found the
boat off the coast of New Jersey, I was very surprised.  But in the end
it did not change how I felt.  I suspect it might have shocked my
mother, such a revelation after so many years of believing the official
version of events.  For this reason, I'm happy she never found out
about it.  She loved him dearly.  She never remarried."

Kohler asked Jiirgen if his father had siblings.  Indeed, his father
had an older brother, Friedhelm.  Kohler asked if Jiirgen might provide
a telephone number for Friedhelm.  Jiirgen gave him an old number.

"I don't even know if he's still alive," Jiirgen said.  "Sadly, we have
fallen out of touch."

Jiirgen and his wife thanked Kohler for his efforts and asked him

to thank Chatterton when he returned to New Jersey.  That night at the
hotel, Kohler and Bowling dialed the number.  An elderly woman
answered.  Bowling introduced herself as the sister of one of U-869s
crewmen.  The woman said she would be happy to bring her husband to the
phone.

For the next hour, eighty-six-year-old Friedhelm Neuerburg remembered
his brother, Helmuth.

"When I close my eyes and picture my brother today," Friedhelm said, "I
see him doing his duty.  I think he had a premonition that he wasn't
coming back.  He did his duty."

In the morning, Kohler and Bowling drove from Hamburg to Berlin.  That
evening, Kohler met with forty-year-old Dr.  Axel Ni-estle, the head of
a private engineering firm that works on waste-disposal projects.
Niestle's doctorate, earned in water-resources science, was based
largely on work he did in North Africa.  In his spare time, as a sort
of hobby, Niestle had made himself the world's foremost authority on
the reassessment of U-boat losses.  It was Niestle who, in 1994, had
thought to look at the intercepted radio messages between U-869 and
U-boat Control, an idea that had occurred to no one else in the world
for history's certainty that U-869 lay sunk off Gibraltar.  He'd
communicated his findings in a written report to Robert Coppock at the
British Ministry of Defence, who'd then relayed the information to
Chatterton and Kohler via letter.  During their meeting, Kohler
marveled not just at the depth of Niestle's knowledge but at his
passion for the subject.  He asked Niestle why he wasn't teaching at a
university.

"U-boats are my avocation," he said.  "Perhaps it would be boring if I
were to earn money from it.  It's the detective's way of treating these
matters that moves me.  Once you find out history is wrong, once you
start investigating it and, with some luck, correcting it, that is
satisfaction enough."

The next day, Kohler and Bowling took the Berlin subway to the quaint
home of an elderly lady.  On a mantelpiece in the living room's center
were framed photos of her children and one of a young, handsome man
from World War II who seemed to look forward into the ages.  The woman
introduced herself as Gisela Engel-mann.  The man in the photo, she
said, was her fiance, Franz Nedel, one of U-869's torpedomen.

For hours, Engelmann told Kohler about tearing the eyes out of Hitler's
picture, about climbing the gas lamp and displaying Hitler's photo for
all Berlin to see, about the going-away party at which Franz and his
fellow crewmen broke down in tears, about how she knows more than ever
that there is only one true love in a person's life, and for her that
love was Franz.

"My two husbands knew about Franz, of course," she said.  "When I would
speak of Franz to my children, they would roll their eyes and say,
"Mother, you've told us this story a hundred and fifty times
already.""

As with the Brandts, Engelmann was left to wonder about her loved one's
fate long after the war's end.  It was not until October 1947 that she
received official word that U-869 had been declared a total loss.

"I missed him every day of my life," she told Kohler.  "I have his
photograph in my bedroom, and I have looked at it every day, through
two marriages and four children, since I waved good-bye to him."

Kohler had one more appointment before flying back to New Jersey.  He
and Bowling flew to Munich, rented a car, and drove west through miles
of breathtaking, snow-covered rural landscape.  Kohler exited at the
small town of Memmingen and followed his directions.  A few minutes
later, he found himself in the city center, a place of winding streets,
centuries-old buildings, and church spires that reached into the
heavens.  Memmingen, he thought, was a painting, the storybook Germany
that Mr.  Segal, the circus strong man, had described to his father.

Kohler maneuvered down narrow side streets until he arrived at one of
the town's most ancient homes.  He rang the doorbell.  A minute later,
a handsome and dignified eighty-year-old gentleman opened the door.
Dressed in a blue suit and red tie, his cotton-white hair combed
perfectly, he looked as if he had been expecting his visitor for
years.

"I am Herbert Guschewski," the man said.  "I was the radioman aboard
U-869.  Please welcome to my home."

In his living room, surrounded by his family, Guschewski told Kohler
the story of how he had survived U-869.

On a warm November morning in 1944, just days before U-869

was to leave for war, Guschewski found himself feeling ill.  When he
stepped outside for fresh air, he became dizzy and collapsed,
unconscious.  Onlookers rushed him to the hospital, where he remained
in a coma with a high fever for three days.  When he came to, the
doctors told him he had contracted pneumonia and pleurisy.  Though
U-869 was to depart in hours, he would be forced to remain in
intensive care.  He was also told he had visitors.

His hospital door opened.  Standing before him, holding chocolate,
cookies, and flowers, was Commander Neuerburg.  Behind him were First
Officer Brandt and Chief Engineer Kessler.  And behind them were many
of the U-boat's crew.  Neuerburg approached Guschewski.  He wiped the
radioman's forehead and stroked his arm.

"You'll be all right, my friend," Neuerburg said.

Brandt stepped forward and took Guschewski's hand.

"Get well, friend," he said, smiling the same smile Guschewski had seen
after he'd told Brandt his jokes.  "You will pull through."

Kessler came forward, as did Horenburg and the other radiomen.  Many
had tears in their eyes.  They wished Guschewski well.

"It finally came time to say good-bye," Guschewski told Kohler.  "I had
the feeling that we would not see each other again.  When I looked into
the eyes of some of my comrades, I could see they thought the same."

Like everyone else, Guschewski had believed that U-869 had been sunk
off Gibraltar.  When he'd got word that divers had found the U-boat off
New Jersey, he'd contacted Spiegel.  It was through Spiegel that Kohler
had come to know of Guschewski.

Kohler stayed for two days.  Guschewski spoke for hours about
Neuerburg, Brandt, Kessler, and the other men he knew from U-869.  He
recounted the bombing of the barracks in Stettin, singing along to
Neuerburg's guitar playing, inadvertently dialing in Radio Calais,
Fritz Dagg's ham theft, his friendship with Horenburg.  He spoke at
length about Brandt's kindness and ready laugh and his willingness,
even at age twenty-two, to bear the fear and trembling of others.  He
told Kohler that he missed his friends.

"It is horrible for me to see the way the boat lies broken in the
ocean," Guschewski said.  "For more than fifty years I remembered it

as new and strong, and I was part of it.  Now I look at the film and
pictures and see the remains of my comrades.... It is very difficult
and sad for me to think of it this way.

"I believe in God and an afterlife.  It would be wonderful to be
reunited with my friends, to see them again, and to see them continue
in peace, not in war, not in a time when so many young lives were lost
for no reason.  I would like to see them like that."

After a second day of conversation, Kohler and Guschewski rose and
shook hands.  Kohler's flight to New Jersey departed in just a few
hours, and Guschewski, an esteemed town councillor, had a meeting that
evening.  Each had more questions for the other.  Each promised another
visit so that the questions would not go unanswered for long.

As Kohler reached for his coat, Guschewski made a request.

"Might it be possible to send me something from the boat?"  Guschewski
asked.  "Anything would do.  Anything I could touch."

"I would be happy to," Kohler said.  "I will send you something the
moment I return home."  He already knew what he would send-a
five-by-six-inch plaque from the ejnergency life raft canister
explaining that item's operation.

"That would mean very much to me," Guschewski said.  He waved good-bye
to Kohler and closed the door.

As Kohler walked toward his car, he felt the bands of his obligation
loosen.  No one should lie anonymous at the bottom of the ocean.  A
person's family needs to know where their loved one lies.  It had grown
colder outside since Kohler had arrived.  He reached for his car keys.
Guschewski pushed open his front door and walked into the winter.  He
was not wearing a coat.  He moved toward Kohler and put his arms around
the diver.

"Thank you for caring," Guschewski said.  "Thank you for coming
here."

U-BOAT ARCHIVE, CUXHAVF.N,

GERMANY

U 869

T (56

+ 1)

Kommandant:

KptLt.  Helmut Neuerburg

am 28.2.1945 im Mittelatlantik auf ; 54 3O' N undO8 13'

W vers

FkMt.

Bienentreu

Mathias 04.12,

MaschMt.

Bohm

Otto 30.03.

OLt.

Brandt

Siegfried 19.06.

MaschOGfr

Breit

Wilhelm 18.12.

MaschOGfr

Brens

Ewald 25.05.

MechGfr

Brizius

Otto 25.02.

MaschMt.

Dagg

Fritz 28.01.

MaschOGfr

Dietmayer

Eduard 50.01.

MaschGfr

Dietz

Hans 17.05.

MaschMt.

Dolcher

Karl 27.07.

OBtsMt.

Drabhoff

Walter 18.06.

MaschOGfr

Dreyer

Karl-Heinz 15.09.

MtrHGfr

Sder

Max 08.08.

MaschMt.

Eigenbrodt

Karl 27.12.

Mar St  Arzt

Dr.  Esau

Ernst-Christian 28.12.

FkOGfr,

Gehlsen

Richard 20.10.

MaschOGfr

Geiflel ^^^n

Otto 28.05.

MaschOGfr

Geratzki ffi_ML3 ^ Gerhard 15.02.

MechGfr

Gradl N^WffHB r Kurt 29.04.

BtsMt.

Grosser \~HHC' / Helmut 50.03.

MechHGfr

Grunert ^$^5^

Hugo 01.10.

MechOGfr

Haselbarth

Karl 06.02.

MtrOGfr

Haun

Srwin 04.05.

OMasch

Hentschel

Arthur 13.10.

MaschOGfr

Hirsch

Horst 04.  04.,

MtrGfr

Hitze

Heinz 04.02.,

FkMstr

Hore nburg

Martin 01.10.

OLt.  (Ing)

Kefiler

Ludwig 10.06."

MtrHGfr

Kischka

Rafael 25.09.

OMasch

Koch Robert 06.09."

MaschOGfr

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Helmut 29.01.,

Mech Mt

Kuhnhold

Osk'ar 28.02.;

OStrm

Lenk

Heinz 08.02.  Mtr

Mehlig

Paul 21.09."

FkOGfr

Mehnert

Rolf 19.08.;

MtrOGfr

Meineke

Georg

14.C4.;

MaschMt.

Mocker

Erich 01.06.;

MtrOGfr

Moosmann

Fritz 15.06.;

MtrOGfr

Nedel

Franz 22.08.;

KptLt.

Neuerburg

Helmut 25.08."

MaschOGfr

Nolte

Willi 25.10.;

MtrGfr

OBwald

Heinz 07.10.;

BtsMt.

Plath

Leo 04.08."

MtrOGfr

Reber

Hans-Georg 09.05.;

MaschOGfr

Rothsprak

Willi 26.01.;

MtrOGfr

Schnick

Willy 05.".;

MtrOGfr

Seefeldt

Willi 18.04."

OStrm

Stockhorst

Wilhelm

CH.10.2

MaschOGfr

Tabel

Wilhelm 07.02.2

MaschOGfr

Tolke

Erich 06.10."

FkOGfr

Uhlarsch

Johann 25.05.2

OMaschMt.

Verhiilsdonk

Heinrich 01.02.2

MaschOGfr

Voigt

Heinz 05.0'+.  2

MtrOGfr

Volderauer

Vinzenz 15.04.2

MaschMt.

V/ernioka

Gunter 18.10.2

MtrGfr

Zander

Peter 21.05.2

Einzelverlust

MechGfr(A)

Schmelzer

Richard 05.12.5

U-869 crew list.

Jill IN CHATTER TON

RICHIE KOHLER

Spare-parts box recovered by Chatterton from the electric motor room.
Note the identifying number in the upper left corner of the box's
tag-the number that finally identified the wreck and solved one of the
last mysteries of World War II.

Martin Horenburg.

Martin Horenburg aboard U-869.

HE lim 1:1 (,i st hi \vsk

Herbert Guschewski, radioman, U-869.

HKKIil'.RT GUSCHKWSK1

JURGKN NEUERBURG

Neuerburg (far right) saluting the ship's ensign after commissioning
the boat on January 26, 1944.

Helmuth Neuerburg, commander, U-869.

Neuerburg used leaves to take his two-year-old son, Jurgen, for
sailboat rides and to bounce his infant daughter, Jutta, on his knee.
Just before U-869's commissioning, he spoke to his brother, Friedhelm.
This time, he mentioned nothing of the Nazis.  He simply looked
Friedhelm in the eye and said, "I'm not coming back'

|UK(.l-\ M I !  KIlL KG

Siegfried Brandt, first officer, U-869.

MCt-IlK KOHLtK

When Brandt's brother Hans-Georg asked their mother why she wept at
this picture of Siegfried sleeping aboard U-869, she told him that it
was the way Siggi was sitting-it reminded her of a child, a baby, and
even though Siggi was a proud warrior, she could still see her little
boy in that photograph.

Franz Nedel, torpedoman, U-869.

Gisela Engelmann, fiancee of Franz Nedel.

RICHIE KOHLER

U-869 at sea during training.  Note the Olympic rings on the conning
tower, indicates a submarine commanded by a graduate of the naval class
of 1936, the year of the Berlin games.

RICHIE KOHLKR

Richie Kohler and Gisela Engelmann, Berlin, January 2002.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

Crew of (J-869, after commissioning, January 26, 1944.  The three
officers stand in the bottom row on the right: Siegfried Brandt is on
the far right, Helmuth Neuerburg is to his right, and Ludwig Kessler is
third from the end.

John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, the two divers around whom this
story revolves, were my business partners in the writing of this book.
They gave me full access to their-files, photographs, videotapes,
notes, and dive logs.  I spent hundreds of hours interviewing
Chatterton and Kohler: at their homes in New Jersey, by phone, by
conference call, on the dive boat Seeker, while cruising the autobahn
with Kohler in Germany, while crouching inside the captured German
submarine L/-505 with Chatterton in Chicago.  Their accounts of the
quest to identify the mystery U-boat-both in the water and on land-were
the foundation upon which this book was written.  Each served as the
first and most critical check on the other.  Upon completing the book,
I asked Chatterton and Kohler to review the manuscript for accuracy.
Neither was allowed editorial control or input-a condition to which
each had agreed before we became partners.  Any manuscript changes they
suggested were strictly of a technical nature.

For accounts of Chatterton's and Kohler's in-water exploration of the
U-boat, I relied frequently on their recollection of events; deep
shipwreck diving is a solitary sport in which memory is often the only
witness.  I viewed videotapes of their dives on those occasions when
videotape was shot.  I studied photographs of the wreck, and consulted
Chatterton's and Kohler's handwritten dive logs.  I interviewed
fourteen

divers who accompanied them on overnight trips to the wreck, including
nine of the original members of the team that had gone searching for
the mystery set of numbers secured from the fishing boat captain by
Bill Nagle.

The wreck came to life for me through a drawing, reproduced here in the
frontispiece, made by Captain Dan Crowell, the current owner of the
Seeker and a longtime diver of the U-boat.  His rendering, an amazing
work of memory and experience, remained taped to my desk throughout the
writing of this book.  It is considered by most who have dived the
wreck to be a small masterpiece.  Several divers, including Steve
Gatto, Brian Skerry, Christina Young, and Kevin Brennan, shot excellent
underwater photographs of the wreck, which helped me to envision the
scenes described to me by Chatterton and Kohler.  I also studied
photos, diagrams, and plans of Type IX U-boats in various books, the
most useful being Vom Original zum Modell: Uboottyp IX C by Fritz Kohl
and Axel Niestle.  Equally valuable was the illustrated tour of U-869
provided by PBS on their Web site for Hitler's Lost Sub, the Nova
documentary on the mystery wreck (pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostsub).  On
numerous occasions, I toured the captured L/-505 at Chicago's Museum of
Science and Industry; each of those visits gave me a tangible feel for
the Type IX U-boat, exactly the kind discovered by the divers in
1991.

I came to know the dive boat Seeker personally.  Captain Dan Crowell
showed me the vessel's corners and contours while it was dry-docked in
Brielle, New Jersey, then invited me on an overnight trip-to also hunt
mystery numbers-to a location about seventy miles offshore.  The seas
were constantly violent and I was tossed from my bunk several times;
there is no more immediate way to understand a dive boat's character,
foibles, and nobility than to spend twenty-four hours aboard it in the
middle of an angry Atlantic.

Many of the stories about deep-wreck diving contained in this book were
told to me by Chatterton and Kohler, as well as by other divers, boat
captains, and witnesses.  Because the sport is so dangerous and has so
few participants (probably just a few hundred in the United States),
many of its stories remain oral history.  Whenever possible, these
stories were checked with the principals involved.  Occasionally,
witnesses provided slightly different accounts of

events, especially when their stories were of close calls or fatalities
and they had been panicked, distracted, or distressed.  Those
inconsistencies were slight; when they occurred, I used the consensus
version of events to conclude, say, that a diver had been underwater
for ten minutes rather than twelve.  For the deaths of the Texas Tower
diver and of Joe Drozd, Chatterton was present and a witness to events.
For the death of Steve Feldman, I interviewed nearly all of the divers
present, including Feldman's dive partner Paul Skibinski, Doug Roberts
and Kevin Brennan, who were in the water and witnessed much of the
unfolding disaster, and John Hildemann and Mark McMahon, who did the
dangerous sand sweeps searching for Feldman on the ocean's bottom.  I
also inspected the written accounts of the incident provided to the
Coast Guard by each diver after returning to shore.  For George Place's
close call, I interviewed Place and Howard Klein, the captain of the
Eagle's Nest, who set out to rescue his stricken diver.  Kohler was
present and a witness to that event as well.  For Dr.  Lewis Kohl's
close call, I interviewed Kohl, his dive partner John Yurga, and
Chatterton and Kohler; all were present and witnessed the event.  For
Jhe deaths of Chris and Chrissy Rouse, I relied on interviews with
Chatterton, Kohler, Yurga, and Crowell, all of whom were present and
participated in the rescue attempt and subsequent recovery of
equipment.  I also read Bernie Chowdhury's book, The Last Dive: A
Father and Son's Fatal Descent into the Ocean's Depths, from
HarperCollins, which recounts the Rouse tragedy and is a very good
account of the dangers of deep diving.

I gleaned insight into the culture of wreck diving in the American
Northeast by spending time with and interviewing divers and boat
captains.  Bucky McMahon's story, "Everest at the Bottom of the Sea,"
published in the July 2000 issue of Esquire, was exceedingly useful to
me and remains perhaps the best account ever written of Andrea Doria
diving and the characters who challenge that legendary wreck.  Kevin F.
McMurray's book Deep Descent: Adventure and Death Diving the Andrea
Doria, from Pocket Books, was also helpful to me in digesting the long
and dangerous history of the Doria and the psyches of those who dive
it.

The physiology of deep water scuba diving was made understandable to me
by several books, the most useful of which was Tim Ecott's Neutral
Buoyancy: Adventures in a Liquid World, from Atlantic Monthly Press. 
Ecott writes beautifully, not just about diving physiology, but about
the transcendent potential of scuba exploration. His work was
inspiring.  Physiologist R. W. Bill Hamilton was patient with me in
explaining some technical aspects of deep scuba.  The life and times of
Bill Nagle were described to me by Chat-tert on Kohler, Yurga, Crowell,
and Andrew Nagle.  Nearly every diver and boat captain I interviewed
had something to say about Nagle's legend.  Captain Skeets Frink was
very helpful to me in explaining how Nagle came to possess the numbers
to the mystery wreck.

I learned about Atlantic Wreck Divers history and culture from Kohler,
one of the group's original members, as well as from Pete Guglieri,
John Lachenmeyer, and Pat Rooney.  I talked to numerous sources about
the age-old rivalries between dive boat captains; McMurray's Deep
Descent and Gary Gentile's The Lusitania Controversies-Book Two:
Dangerous Descents into Shipwrecks and Law, from Gary Gentile
Productions, were also useful to me along those lines.  For information
on Steve Feldman, I interviewed his dive partner Paul Skibinski, as
well as his friends Tommy Cross, Marty Dick, John Hopkins, Andrew Ross,
and boat captain Paul Hepler.  For the lives of Chris and Chrissy
Rouse, Chowdhury's The Last Dive was quite interesting.  For the lives
of Chatterton and Kohler, I spoke to their ex-wives, current wives,
friends, and family.  For Chatterton's Vietnam experience, I
interviewed John Lacko, with whom Chatter-ton saw combat, and Dr.
Norman Sakai, a battalion surgeon who served with Chatterton.  Charles
Kinney, a former Vietnam medic and author, provided an enlightening
overview of the medic's place in the Vietnam War.

I relied on several sources to confirm the process and substance of
Chatterton's and Kohler's research.  Their files contained copies of
many of the original historical documents they used to pursue the
identity of the mystery U-boat, including attack reports, analyses of
antisubmarine action, radio-intercept intelligence summaries,
translations of U-boat Control diary entries, and incident reports.  In
rare instances in which the divers gleaned information from his tori

A NOTE ON SOURCES 341

cal documents they had not or could not have copied, I used books and
consulted with experts to confirm the information.  Invaluable to me in
this endeavor (and many others) was Clay Blair's superbly researched
and astonishingly complete two-volume set, Hitler's U-boat War,
published by Random House.  In these volumes, Blair includes
information from both the German and Allied sides, which is not true of
every book on the subject, while covering the operational, technical,
and intelligence aspects of the U-boat war with rare readability and
insight.  The set was the single most useful written resource I used
while writing Shadow Divers.  On countless occasions, German naval
researcher Axel Niestle confirmed or refined the accuracy of
Chatterton's and Kohler's research.  I inspected dozens of letters
between the divers and various sources with whom they corresponded
about the mystery U-boat, many of which helped me understand the mood,
evolution, and maturity of their research.  At the Naval Historical
Center in Washington, D.C."  I interviewed Dean Allard, Bernard
Cavalcante, William Dudley, and Kathleen Lloyd, all of whom spoke to me
about the divers' methods, resources, approach, and character.  Timothy
Mulligan at the National Archives in Washington was similarly helpful.
On the subject of the Civil Air Patrol and its possible role in the
sinking of the mystery sub, I spoke to Lt.  Col.  Gregory Weidenfeld of
that organization, and also read his monograph on the topic, The Search
for the HagginFarr Sub Kill.  On the subject of blimps and U-boats, I
interviewed Gordon Vaeth, former intelligence officer for the Atlantic
Fleet airships during World War II, and benefited greatly from his
book, Blimps & U-Boats: U.S. Navy Airships in the Battle of the
Atlantic, published by Naval Institute Press.  The personal letters of
U-boat ace Karl-Friedrich Merten, written to Chatterton in the early
stages of the divers' research, helped me understand that officer's
opinion about the mystery wreck.  Most newspaper accounts cited in the
book were saved by Chatterton and Kohler and kept in scrapbooks, and
were easily checked.  Finally, I studied the divers' extensive research
notes, which chronicled not just their findings, but often their
mind-sets.  In very rare cases, where opinions in published sources or
between experts conflicted, I relied on Blair's Hitler's U-boat War.

342 A NOTE ON SOURCES

A NOTE ON SOURCES 343

To learn the history of the U-boat war, no source was more valuable to
me than Blair's books.  I also relied regularly on a Web site-
uboat.net-the best Internet resource for information on U-boat history,
commanders, the fates of various submarines, and much more.  It is
virtually impossible to research U-boats without utilizing this
excellent, thorough, and well-designed resource.  The transcript to
Nova's program Hitler's Lost Sub, available at the aforementioned PBS
Web site, was also useful for its interviews with various scholars and
U-boat veterans.  For the histories and fates of individual U-boats
(other than U-869), Blair's books were a primary source, as was
Niestle's German U-boat Losses During World War II: Details of
Destruction, from Naval Institute Press.  When I needed information on
U-boats that I could not find, I called or wrote to Niestle, who was
always helpful.  Statistics on U-boats and U-boat losses vary widely
among the many books and articles published on the subject; my figures
were taken from the above-mentioned book by Niestle.  A German private
researcher, Niestle is among the most original minds writing about
U-boats, and continues to work at the forefront of reexamining U-boat
losses.  His book, in addition to providing many of the most current
U-boat statistics, also includes an excellent explanation of postwar
assessment mistakes-the very kinds of mistakes that made the mystery at
the core of this book so difficult to solve.

For information on the lives and times of U-boat crewmen, I constantly
referred to Timothy Mulligan's excellent book Neither Sharks nor
Wolves: The Men of Nazi Germany's U-boat Arm, 1939-1945, from Naval
Institute Press.  The book, set against the context of the larger war
effort and the changing fate of Germany, is a classic overview of the
men who fought the U-boat war.  Mulligan, an archivist who specializes
in captured German and World War II-era records, based much of his
research on surveys of over a thousand U-boat veterans.  I read several
books by Jak P. Mailman Showell, many of which can be commended for
painting incisive pictures of life aboard the U-boats, the command
structure of the U-boat force, and the men who manned these vessels.
The most useful to me among them was U-boats Under the Swastika,
published by Naval Institute Press; at just 132 pages, it provided a
fine and easily digestible primer.  I spent invaluable time in Toronto
with Werner Hirschmann, the former chief engineer of U-190.  In a few
days with Mr.  Hirschmann, I learned more about U-boat life than I
might have in years of reading.

In learning about the history, fate, and crew of U-869, I benefited
greatly from the following sources:

For the life and career of commander Helmuth Neuerburg, I inspected his
military records and interviewed his son, Jiirgen, and brother,
Friedhelm, in Germany.  (Neuerburg's first name is spelled in various
ways by various sources; I used "Helmuth," as that is how he appeared
to sign his own name on his military records.)

For the life and career of First Officer Siegfried Brandt, I inspected
his military records, interviewed his brother Hans-Georg Brandt, and
his friends, Clemens Borkert and Heinz Schley, in Germany.

For the life and career of torpedoman Franz Nedel, I interviewed his
fiancee, Gisela Engelmann, in Germany.

I devoted several days in Germany to interviewing Herbert Guschewski,
the former radioman on U-869.  It was through Guschewski that I gleaned
insight into the subs-crew and officers, especially Neuerburg, Brandt,
and Martin Horenburg, the U-boat's senior radioman.  Many stories and
details of U-869's training came from these interviews with Mr.
Guschewski, as well as from the boat's training diary.  General
information about U-boat training, some of which informed the chapters
on U-869's training, was taken from several books, most notably
Mulligan's Neither Sharks nor Wolves, as well as from my interviews
with Werner Hirschmann.

I was able to accurately envision the crew of U-869, as well as the
submarine itself, thanks to dozens of photographs of the men and their
boat, some of which were taken by the Kriegsmarine, others of which
were given to Chatterton and Kohler by family members of the crewmen
and by Mr.  Guschewski.

I was able to reconstruct U-869's doomed patrol thanks in part to
Niestle's 1994 breakthrough monograph, The Loss of U-869.  It was this
written report that changed the thinking about the fate of U-869 and
(indirectly) advanced the divers' efforts to identify the mystery
wreck.  Also invaluable was Blair's summary of the patrol in

344 A NOTE ON SOURCES

volume 2 of Hitler's U-boat War.  Text from Allied intelligence
analysis of radio intercepts between LJ-869 and U-boat Control were
taken from copies of those analyses.  Over the course of a lengthy
in-person interview in Germany, Niestle helped me to envision the most
likely scenario to explain and describe U-869's final moments. Finally,
I accompanied Kohler to Germany in 2002; my account of his trip is
taken from my own experience.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author is grateful for the kind help and support of the following
people:

Heather Schroder at International Creative Management.  A writer dreams
of finding an agent like Heather.  She is 'at once a fierce and
tireless advocate, a lover of great story, an exceptional and eager
reader, and a lovely person.  I cannot imagine a journey without her.
Thanks also to Heather's assistant, Chrissy Rikkers, for reading my
work and for her cheerful patience.

Jonathan Karp, my editor at Random House.  In ways, Jon understood this
book before I did.  He distilled the essence of this story, and urged
me to bet on it, and for that I will be forever grateful.  To this day,
I remain the lucky beneficiary of his storytelling instincts, and
continue to admire his gracious and unhurried way and gentlemanly
demeanor.  While researching this book in Toronto, I had a short
telephone conversation with Jon in which he outlined his conception of
great narrative nonfiction.  I have thought differently about writing
ever since.  Thanks also at Random House to: Jonathan Jao, assistant to
Jonathan Karp, for reading and commenting on my work; Dennis Ambrose,
my thoughtful production editor (and a scuba diver to boot); Bonnie
Thompson, an extraordinary copy editor and a true artist at her craft;
Amelia Zalcman, for her fine review of my manuscript; and also

346 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

to Gina Centrello, Elizabeth McGuire, Anthony Ziccardi, Carol
Schneider, Thomas Perry, Sally Marvin, Ivan Held, Ann Godoff, Gene
Mydlowski, Kate Kim-Centra, Claire Tisne, Nicole Bond, Rachel
Bernstein, Susanne Gutermuth, Erich Schoeneweiss, Stacey Ornstein,
Bridget Piekarz, Tom Nevins, Jaci Updike, Don Weisburg, Martin McGrath,
Allyson Pearl, Sandy Pollack, Liz Will-ncr, David Thompson, John
Groton, Andrew Weber, David Underwood, Janet Cooke, Peter Olson, and
Kelle Ruden.

John Chatterton and Richie Kohler.  Once in his life, if he's lucky, a
writer has the chance to work with a true pioneer.  In Chatterton and
Kohler, I got to work with two.  Each is exceptionally bright,
self-critical, and descriptive, a gift from the heavens for an author.
And each was endlessly generous with his time, granting me hundreds of
hours of interviews in person, over the phone, aboard the dive boat
Seeker, on the autobahn in Germany, and even while crouching between
compartments inside U-505, the captured German submarine on display in
Chicago.  I could phone either of them at midnight and each understood
instinctively why I had to know right away rather than the following
morning.  In knowing these men, I feel closer to understanding what it
means to be a seeker.  Thanks also to Chatterton's wife, Carla
Madrigal, and Kohler's wife, Carrie Bassetti, two wonderful people who
indulged my demands on their husbands' time with kindness and
hospitality.

Annette Kurson, among the finest writers I know, who tirelessly read
and edited my manuscript, and who taught me years ago that good writing
derives from good thinking.

Ken Kurson, my brother, my best friend, and the greatest champion a
person could hope for in life, and also his family, Becky, Steve, and
Karen.  The Glovers-Jane, Larry, Mike, and Sam-for their encouragement,
enthusiasm, and belief in me always.  And the memory of Jack D. Kurson,
the best storyteller I've ever known.

Axel Niestle, an original scholar and thinker, and a true gentleman.
Dr.  Niestle always was gracious and precise when I called upon his
U-boat expertise.  It is an honor to know such a person.

John Yurga, an extraordinary deep-wreck diver who was invaluable in the
effort to discover the identity of the mystery U-boat.  His insight,
command of detail, dedication, and intellect-all in a soft-spoken and
humble package-were inspiring.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 347

Werner Hirschmann, chief engineer of U-190.  No one speaks more insight
fully and poetically about life aboard a U-boat than does Hirschmann. 
He received me at his home in Toronto, drove me in his vintage orange
Karmann Ghia, and told beautiful and poignant stories about life as a
U-boat officer.  His account of the homesick crewmen adopting a fly
aboard his submarine-and then nurturing and loving that fly-continues
to linger with me.

In the United States, Captain Dan Crowell, Barbara Bowling, and Tim
Requarth were exceedingly generous in lending their time, expertise,
and reflection.

In Germany, these people opened their homes and memories to me:
Hans-Georg Brandt and the Brandt family; Gisela Engelmann; Michael
Foedrowitz; Friedhelm Neuerburg; and Jilrgen Neuerburg.  And special
thanks to Herbert Guschewski, who devoted long days to recounting
memories that have, for decades, been both painful and sacred.

The following people kindly granted me interviews, all of which made
this book better and more complete:

Dean Allard, Bernard Cavalcajite, William Dudley, R. W. Bill Hamilton,
Hank Keatts, Kathleen Lloyd, Timothy Mulligan, Gordon Vaeth, and Lt.
Col.  Gregory Weidenfeld.

Captain Sal Arena, Steve Bielenda, Dr.  Fred Bove, Kevin Bren-nan, Kip
Cochran, Harry Cooper, Captain Skeets Frink, Lloyd Gar-rick, Steve
Gatto, Pete Guglieri, John Hildemann, Jon Hulburt, Captain Howard
Klein, Dr.  Lewis Kohl, John Lachenmeyer, Mark McMahon, John Moyer, Ed
Murphy, Andrew Nagle, Tom Packer, Captain Billy Palmer, George Place,
Captain Paul Regula, Doug Roberts, Pat Rooney, Susan Rouse, Dick Shoe,
Brian Skerry, and Paul Skibinski.

Patricia Arison, Felicia Becker, Lisa Biggins, Clemens Borkert, Kathy
Chatterton, Bernie Chowdhury, Tommy Cross, Don Davidson, Bill
Delmonico, Marty Dick, Captain Paul Hepler, Hank Hoke, John Hopkins,
Charles Kinney, Fran Kohler, Frank Kohler, Frankie Kohler, John Kohler,
Richard Kohler Sr."  John Lacko, Ruby Miller, Paul Murphy, Inge
Oberschelp, Andrew Ross, Dr.  Norman Sakai, Heinz Schley, and the
excellent film makers Rush DeNooyer and Kirk Wolfinger of Lone Wolf
Pictures.

These men have believed in me and made me a better writer:

348 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

David Granger, Peter Griffin, and Mark Warren of Esquire; Joseph
Epstein of Northwestern University; and Richard Babcock of Chicago
magazine.  Without Babcocks generosity and patience, I could not have
written this book.

I cannot adequately thank the Wisniewski family-Kazimiera, Eugeniusz,
and Paula-for providing our family the love and care that allowed me
the time and peace of mind to complete this work.

And, finally, thanks to my son, Nate, whose natural joy and sweetness
inspires me every day, and to my wife, Amy Kurson, the smartest and
kindest person I know.  In the midst of raising a new baby and
conducting her own demanding career, Amy talked for hours with me about
the story and gave me endless space and support, always with a smile.
It is through her that I see good in the world I do not otherwise
see.

INDEX

acoustic torpedoes, 324

Act II Glass and Mirrors, 138

Agent Orange, 328

Agru-Front testing, 271-72

air generators, 86

air hoses, 86

air tanks, 70, 84, 327

Andrea Doria dives and, 36-38 in deep-shipwreck diving, 27, 30,

33,35,89

Feldman's death and, 105 Kohler's childhood and, 125 Kohler's early
wreck dives and,

132-33, 136 retrieving Feldman's body and,

196 and return trips to U-869, 214-18,

224,243,302,311-23 Alabama, 179 Algol, USS, 327 Allard, Dean, 176,
178-80 American Revolution, 234 Anacostia River, 176 anchor lines,
296

Andrea Doria dives and, 37-38 in deep-shipwreck diving, 27-31, 37-40

and discovery of U-869, 44-46, 48 51, 54 Feldman's death and, 101-2,
104,

106 and return Hips to U-869, 99-102,

104, 106, 117-18, 163, 165-66,

202,205,214-16,220,242,

302-4, 323 anchors, 183

of charter boats, 27

and discovery of U-869, 44-45,

55-56 and return trips to U-869, 209, 212,

302 Andrea Doria, 36-39, 291

artifacts from, 8-9, 18-19, 39, 50,

91, 109-12, 114, 133, 158,241,

245-46,249,251 blocking opening into, 111-13, 169,

Brennan's dives to, 50 challenges posed by, 8, 18 Chatterton and,
18-19, 88-91,

109-14, 169-70,223,240,

245-46 comparisons between U-869 and,

Andrea Doria (cont'd)

cutting opening in, 109-10

entangled diver in, 36-38

exploring stern of, 9

fame of, 88

Gimbel's Hole of, 36

helm of, 158

inside of, 91, 109-12

KEEP CLEAR OF PROPELLERS sign of,

18 Kohlerand, 109-14, 131-33, 140,

169-70,240

Nagle and, 7-11, 18-19, 52, 56, 90, 109-13, 158, 169,206, 241, 251 size
of, 18

videotapes of, 110-12 ankle weights, 27 antiaircraft guns, 266
anti-Semitism, 265, 275 Anti-submarine Warfare (ASW)

Incident Reports, 180 Apollo program, 121 Arcaro, Eddie, 68 Arison, Rae
Emmet, 69, 71, 73, 78 armor-piercing rounds, 78 Armstrong, Neil, 121
Army, U.S."  73-83 Army Corps of Engineers, 124 artifacts, 90-92, 100,
105, 320 horn Andrea Doria, 8-9, 18-19, 39, 50,91, 109-12, 114, 133,
158,241,245-46,249,251 Bielenda's policy on, 58 Chatterton and, 83-85,
91-92, 109-10, 114, 141, 144, 160-61, 166-69, 174, 183,
211,223-24,243-50,313,330 crewmen's names carved into,

168, 171-72

for crewmen's relatives, 331, 335 in deep-shipwreck diving, 27, 32 and
discovery of U-869, 58-59,

eagles and swastikas on, 117-18, 141, 144, 146, 154, 158, 164,
168,244,248 greed and, 38-39

Kohlerand, 109-10, 114, 132-36, 154-55, 158-59, 164-65, 167,
170,209-12,249,290,335 and media on U-869, 145-46 at NHC 176 retrieving
Feldman's body and,

156-57 and return trips to U-869,

115-19, 158-61, 163-69, 171, 198-99,203-6,209-15, 223-24, 240, 243-50,
287, 298,313-14,318,327 from Saw Diego, 133 from shipwrecks, 4-9, 18-19
and theories on U-869, 209 U-boat research and, 95, 142-43, 154, 170,
172-74, 176, 179, 183,226-27,234 from U-853, 91-92, 300-301 value of,
4-7 see also specific artifacts Asaka, 73-75, 78 Associated Press, 145
Atlantic City, NJ."  84

retrieving Feldman's body and,

and return trips to U-869, 217 U-boat research and, 152 Atlantic Fleet,
U.S."  175 Atlantic Ocean, 3-11, 209, 291 Andrea Doria dives and,
7-11,

18-19

in bad weather, 212, 219, 221 Chatterton's childhood and, 68,

71,82 Chatterton's scallop-fishing boat employment and, 83-84 currents
in, 15-16, 28-29, 31,

45-46, 48-49, 52-54 deep-shipwreck diving in, 4-11,

26-31,39-40 and discovery of U-869, 14-16,

19-21,42-46, 50 Kohler's childhood and, 125-26 Kohler's early wreck
dives and,

135, 138

and return trips to U-869, 198, 212,219,248,288

seasickness on, 9

sunken U-boats in, 55

U-boat research and, 94, 255-56

uncharted floor of, 5-6

and war patrol of U-869, 306-9 Atlantic States, 227 Atlantic Wreck
Divers (AWD), 109-12, 118, 167,239-40

Andrea Doria dives and, 110-12, 169, 240

calendars of, 139-40

and Chatterton's relationship with Kohler, 169-70

creation of, 136-37

Kohler criticized by, 240

Kohler's early wreck dives and, 136-40

logo of, 109, 114, 137, 158, 197

nicknames of members of, 138-39

on surfacing without decompressing, 217

teamwork of, 165

Baltic Sea, 266-67, 271-73, 276 Baltimore, Md."  65, 329 Bar-O-Matic,

72 BBC, 265

BdUKTBs, 180, 187,225 bells, 8-9, 58, 158,241,251 bends (decompression
sickness):

in deep-shipwreck diving, 23, 25-26, 28

Kohler's early wreck dives and, 135-36

Kohl's accident and, 201-2

and return trips to U-869, 100, 218

Rouses'deaths and, 218 Berlin, 274-76

British bombing of, 259, 275-76

Kohler's trip to, 332-33

Olympic Games in, 260

and training on U-869, 263 Bermuda, 188-89 Bidevind, 140 Bielenda,
Steve, 56-58, 118, 297

Andrea Doria dives and, 110-13

claim-jumping fears and, 98, 104,

107, 141, 143-44, 155 and discovery of U-869, 56, 58 fame of, 57

Kohler's relationship with, 61, 140 Nagle's relationship with, 57-58,

61, 110, 112

physical appearance of, 56-57 retrieving Feldman's body and,

156-57 and return trips to U-869, 98,

104, 107,288 binnacles, 32 binoculars, 247-48, 250 blackfish, 15 Black
Forest, 296 Black May, 237, 266 Black Sea, 327-28 blimps, 150, 154,
171, 175, 180 blindness, 26

Block Island, RI."  124, 299-300 booby traps, 80, 84 boots:

in commercial diving, 87 * and return trips to U-869, 161,

205-6, 209."  243 U-boat research and, 142-43 Boston, Mass."  227-29,
233 Boston Sea Rovers, 300 bottom finders, 43-45 Bowling, Barbara,
329-33 Bowling, Mac, 329 Brandt, Elise, 269-71, 276-77, 280 Brandt,
Hans-Georg, 270-71,

276-78, 280-81 Kohler's meeting with, 330-33 U-869 toured by, 277-78,
330-31 Brandt, Norbert, 269-71, 280-81 Brandt, Otto, 269-71, 276-77,
280 Brandt, Siegfried "Siggi," 262-63,

268-73, 276-78

and celebration on U-869, 272-73 character of, 268-69, 270-71,

education of, 269-70 and illness of Guschewski, 334 on leaves in
Zinten, 276--77', 280 letters to family from, 280-81

Brandt, Siegfried "Siggi," (cont'd) musical talent of, 277 Neuerburg's
relationship with, 268-69,271,277-78,281 physical appearance of, 268,
280 politics of, 269-70 religious beliefs of, 269, 276, 281 and return
trips of divers to

U-869, 287, 330 and sinking of U-869, 325 tour of U-869 conducted by,

277-78,330-31 and training on U-869, 268-69,

271,277 transfer to U-boat service of,

270-71

U-boat research and, 285 U-869 posting of, 271 war patrol and, 281, 310
Bredow, Horst, 148

and Chatterton's trip to Germany,

183-85 Horenburg's identity and, 172,

174-75

U-boat research and, 232-33, 243 Breezy Point, N.Y."  124 Bremen:

and commissioning of U-869, 262 departure of U-869 from, 266 see also
Deschimag-Bremen shipyard Brennan, Kevin:

Andrea Doria dives of, 50

and discovery of U-869, 43-45,

50-51,54,60-62 equipment of, 50-51, 54 Feldman's death and, 101-3,
106,

and media on U-869, 145 oath broken by, 60-62 physical appearance of,
50 and return trips to U-869, 95,

101-3, 106, 108, 114-16, 140 Bridges, Lloyd, 7 Brielle, NJ."  3-4,
10-16, 171, 206,

326-27

and discovery of U-869, 14-16, 19-21, 55,60

fishing off coast of, 1 3 and media on U-869, 144 Nagle's residence in,
10-12 in off-season, 11 physical appearance of, 4 and return trips to
U-869, 97-98, 115,210-11,223,239-40, 248, 250, 304 U-boat research and,
65 Britannic, HMHS, 327 Brizius, Otto, 261,285, 329 Broco underwater
torches, 109-10 Buckley, USS, 227 buddy system:

deep-shipwreck diving and,

30-31 and return trips to U-869,

157-58 builder's plaques:

and return trips to U-869, 116,

286, 290 U-boat research and, 94-95, 116,

143 buoyancy compensators, buoyancy wings: in deep-shipwreck diving,
27-30,

33,39

and, discovery of U-869, 45, 54 Feldman's death and, 101 and return
trips to U-869, 163, 165

California, 72, 84 Cambodia, 72 Camden, NJ."  85-86 Cape Cod, Mass."
227-28 Cape Hatteras, N.C."  227, 229 Cape May, NJ."  83-84 Carolina,

USS, 9-10, 61, 63

Chatterton's dives to, 293-94 Cavalcante, Bernard, 176-80,

187-88

cave diving, 203-4, 214 Cayru, 61 CBS, 43,96

chain falls, 298, 301,303-4 chairs, 34-35 Champion, brass whistle of,
7

charter boats, charter-boat business,

9-17

anchor lines of, 27-31, 37-40 anchors of, 27 and Chatterton's
fascination with shipwrecks, 89 for deep-shipwreck diving, 26-30,

39-40 Kohler's early wreck dives and,

133-34, 136, 138 metal ladders of, 39-40 ofNagle, 10-11, 17,56-58,89,
91-92, 109-10, 140,206,226, 251

ofSkeets, 12-16, 19 U-boat research and, 179 chart tables, 95

Chatterton, Carla Madrigal, 328 Chatterton, Jack: alcoholism of, 68
death of, 83 smoking of, 68

son's childhood and, 67-69, 72 son's education and, 72 Chatterton,
John, ix-xi, 16-21, 63-100, 140-213 aid bag supplies of, 75, 78-79, 81
alcohol consumed by, 73 ambitions of, 71-73, 89-90, 243 Andrea Doria
dives and, 18-19, 88-91,109-14,169-70,223, 240, 245-46

artifacts and, 83-85, 91-92, 109-10, 114, 141, 144, 160-61, 166-69,
174, 183, 211,223-24,243-50,313, 330

birth of, 67

Carolina dives of, 293-94 childhood of, 67-72, 74, 82, 154,

claim-jumping fears and, 56, 58-59,63,98, 141, 143-44, 155 commercial
diving career of, x, 17,

85-89, 328

courage of, 19, 69, 78-81, 90 and date on escape lung, 246-47

deep-shipwreck diving skills of, x, 16-19,44,89-90, 286,

294-97 despair of, 287, 290, 294-95,

314 diet of, 73, 82-83, 170, 224, 232,

293, 295 and discovery of U-869, 19-21,

42-56, 58-60, 63-66, 99, 162, 176, 178,234, 314, 323 on disturbing
human remains,

91-92,207-8 diving motives of, 19 education of, 69, 71-73, 83,

85-86, 328 explosion in garage of, 245-46,

320 and fallen fuel tank in U-869,

304-5,311-17,319-22 fame of, 19,91,286,294-95 Feldman's death and,
103-7,

156-57 finances of, 66, 68, 72, 83-86, 88,

188-89

first wife courted by, 84-85, 90 heritage of, 69, 71, 73, 78
hitchhiking of, 70-71, 182 Horenburg's identity and, 168-69,

171-74 and identifying tags from U-853,

299-301 after identifying U-869, 327-28,

330, 332 illnesses of, 328 and Kohler's abandonment of diving,
289-91,293, 295 Kohler's relationship with, 61,

109-15, 118-19, 154, 158-59,

163, 165-66, 169-71, 175,

184-86, 197-98,208,240,

242, 246, 250-52, 288-93,

296-99,303,311-12,317-20,

323, 328

Kohl's accident and, 200-202 love life of, 82, 84-85, 252,

296-97,299,314,327-28 and media on U-869, 144-47,

151, 153

Chatterton, John (cont'd)

military career of, 72-83, 85-86, 88,200,219,221,223,230,

328 in mistaking U-857 for U-869,

239, 246, 252, 256 Mouse's relationship with, 75-76,

80 Nagle's charter-boat business run by, 140

Nagle's death and, 251-52 Nagle's relationship with, 16-20,

52,89,91-92,98, 109, 111,

113,210-11,226,243,

251-52

Nagle's suicide threats and, 226 NHC and 175-82, 187-89 physical
appearance of, 16-17,

71,80,82, 110, 114 and positive identification of

U-869, 323-24, 327-29 principles of, 81-82, 90-92,

98-99, 113,208,286 reputation of, 19,80-81,91 and return trips to

U-869, 98-99,

103-7, 113-19, 141, 157-71,

176, 178, 195-206,209-13,

216-24, 239-44, 247-51, 286,

288,290-91,293,295,

297-99,301-4,311-23,327 Rouses and, 203-4, 216-24 scallop-fishing boat
employment of, 83-85, 90, 252 scuba diving skills of, 88-90 sense of
humor of, 69-70, 91, 98,

shark threat and, 202 and sinking of U-869, 325-26 Texas Tower and,
17-18, 90 Texel dives of, 294 and theories on U-869, 186-93,

206, 209, 247 trimixand, 195-200, 240, 242,

311 trips to Washington of, 175-82,

185-89, 194, 225-29, 253-55 trip to Germany of, 175, 182-86,

U-boat research and, 64-67, 93-95,98, 116-17, 142-43, 147-54, 159, 161,
166, 170-94, 197-99,205-7,209, 224-35, 237-39, 245, 247-48, 253-58,
285-87, 299-301, 332 underwater entrapment of,

316-18,322 Chatterton, Kathy Caster, 84-86,

89-90, 245, 287 husband's commercial diving career and, 85-86

husband's courtship of, 84-85, 90 and husband's relationship with

Kohler, 185 husband's U-boat research and,

66, 181 marital problems of, 252, 296-97,

299,314,327 pistol shooting skills of, 84, 90,

252,297

shipwrecks explored by, 89 Chatterton, Mac Rae 68-69 Chatterton,
Patricia Arison, 67-70,

72,82 china:

from Andrea Doria, 39, 91,

109-12,245,249 from U-869, 117-18, 141, 143-46, 154-55, 158-61,
164-67,313 Chinette plates, 164 Choa-pa, 10 chokes, 25 chronometers,
250 Chu Lai, 74

Churchill, Winston, 235 circle-runners, 232-33, 324-25 Civilian Air
Patrol (CAP):

and theories on U-869, 186-87,

190-91,206

U-boat research and, 151-53, 171, 180, 186-87, 190-91, 246-47 civil
rights, 71 Clancy, Tom, 191 clips, 27, 49 clocks, 32, 250, 263

clothing, 161,209-10

CNN, 146

Coast Guard, U.S."  58, 141, 156

Feldman's death and, 104-5, 107

Kohler's childhood and, 125-27

Kohl's accident and, 201-2

retrieving Feldman's body and, 196

and return trips to U-869, 217, 219-23,317

Rouses'deaths and, 217, 219-23

U-boat research and, 187 Cobra attack helicopters, 79 Cochran, Kip:

and discovery of U-869, 43, 53

and return trips to U-869, 95-96 code breaking:

U-boat research and, 254

in U-boat war, 236-37

and war patrol of U-869, 308 codfish, 13-14 Coimbra:

bow of, 136

helms from, 7

Kohler's dives to, 133, 136 cologne bottles, 167 commercial diving:

chain falls and, 298

of Chatterton, x, 17, 85-89, 328

dangers in, 87

equipment in, 86-87

planning in, 87-88

tri mix and, 194 compasses, 27, 133 computers, 85, 237 conduits,
31,34-35,93 conning tower, conning towers:

of submarines, 55

U-boat research and, 147, 178, 188, 190

of U-158, 188, 190

of U-869, 99, 116-17, 178, 205,

260, 277-78, 325 Cooper, Harry, 171-72

Horenburg's identity and, 172

and return trips to U-869, 158-59

U-boat research and, 149-50, 171

Coppock, Robert, 230-32, 253-55,

Core, USS, 256, 309 Corvallis, 19, 63 Cousteau, Jacques, 5, 71, 196
crabs, 106-7, 127 crowbars, 27

in deep-shipwreck diving, 89 and return trips to U-869, 302,

320 Crowell, Danny, 39

and discovery of U-869, 62-63 and entrapment of Chatterton,

317 and fallen fuel tank in U-869,

Feldman's death and, 104-6 after identifying U-869, 327 and return
trips to U-869, 95, 104-5, 197-98,200,203-6, 211-12,216-17,220,241,
317,327

Rouses'deaths and, 217, 220 currents, 15-16,28-29, 31 ~ in commercial
diving, 87

and discovery of U-869, 45-46,

48-49, 52-54 and return trips to U-869,

248 Cuxhaven-Altenbruch, 148, 172,

183 cylinders, 47, 55

Dachau, 275

Dagg, Fritz, 261,279-80, 334 Das Boot, 54, 62, 296 Davidson, Don,
128-29, 140 Dead Horse Bay, 124 Deans, Billy, 195-96 decision making:

Chatterton on, 81-82

in commercial diving, 88

Feldman's death and, 104 deck guns, 266

and return trips to U-869, 197-98,200,203-4, 206

U-boat research and, 225

of U-i58, 191-92

decompression, 25-28

in deep-shipwreck diving, 23,

25-26, 28, 30-31, 33, 37-40,

45, 49-52 and discovery of U-869, 45-46,

49-52 Feldman's death and, 100, 102-3,

105-6 Kohler's early wreck dives and,

Kohl's accident and, 202-3 and return trips to U-869, 100,

102-3, 105-6, 117, 165,200,

205,216-18,246,304,315,

Rouses'deaths and, 216-18 in scuba diving, 11 technique for, 26
trimixand, 194-95,200 decompression sickness, see bends Dee-psea
Detectives, 328 deep-shipwreck diving, deep-shipwreck divers, 16-56
anchor lines in, 27-31, 37-40 Andrea Doria and, 7-11,18-19,

36-39,50, 52,56,88-91,

109-14, 131-33, 140, 158,

169-70,206,223,240-41,

245-46,251 artifacts in, 27, 32 ascents in, 23, 25-26, 28, 30-31,

33,37-41 in Atlantic Ocean, 4-11, 26-31,

39-40

in bad weather, 212-13,216-19 buddy system in, 157-58 to Carolina,
293-94 charter boats for, 26-30, 39-40 and Chatterton's relationship
with

Kohler, 109-14 Chatterton's skills in, x, 16-19,

44( 89-90, 286, 294-97 currents in, 45-46, 48-49, 52-54,

248 dangers in, x, 22-38, 40-41, 90,

135,312 decompression in, 23, 25-26, 28,

30-31, 33, 37-40, 45, 49-52

descents in, 30-31

and discovery of U-869, ix, 14-16, 19-21,23,42-56,58-66, 96-97,99, 114,
144-49, 151, 162, 170, 175-76, 178, 187, 234,252,314,323,327,331, 334

disturbing human remains and, 208

emotions in, 24-25, 29-31, 35-39, 89-90

equipment in, 22, 27-31, 33, 35-39,45-51,53-55,60,89, 95,97, 100-106,
109-10, 112-18, 135-36, 160-65, 197, 200-201,204,213-14,
216-19,224,243,247-48, 297,302,311-23,327

Feldman and, 60, 96-97, 100-108

grapples in, 27, 29

hallucinating in, 24

hearing in, 31

after identifying U-869, 327-28

independence in, 30-31

instincts in, 29

judgment and motor skills in, 23-25, 36

Kohler's abandonment of, 289-91, 293, 295

Kohler's skills in, x, 60-61, 108, 114, 134-40, 167

locomotion in, 34

manual dexterity in, 24, 36

marine life in, 29, 31-33, 39

and media on U-869, 144-46

Nagle's skills in, 4-11, 16-17, 44, 56

navigation in, 26-27, 33-34, 38

negative buoyancy in, 30-31

physical appearance of, 29-30

planning in, 26-27, 32, 134-36

pressure in, 23-24

and return trips to U-869, 95-108, 113-20, 140-42, 156-71, 176, 178,
194-206, 209-24, 239-51, 253, 286-88, 290-91,293,295,297-99, 301-4,
311-23,327, 330

in rough seas, 40, 45-46, 245

safety in, 22, 26, 41

sand sweeps in, 105-6

self-rescue in, 31

teamwork in, 134-36

trimixand, 194-97, 200

uniqueness of, 22-23

visibility in, x-xi, 24, 28, 30-39, 89-90

weightlessness in, 31, 39

in working inside shipwrecks,

32-38

deep-water blackouts, 107, 194 Defence Ministry, British, 230-31,

253,332

demolition, 86, 88 Denigris, Rob, 70-71 Denmark Strait, 308 DeNooyer,
Rush, 329 Deschimag-Bremen shipyard, 211-12

and crew of U-869, 259-61

and engraved artifact from U-869, 211

U-boat research and, 212, 224-25

U-869 built at, 271 Desco Pot helmets, 86, 88 dials, 27, 93 diaries,
331

and Chatterton's trip to Germany, 183

and return trips to U-869, 327

U-boat research and, 180-81, 187, 189,225-26,228

of U-158, 189

and war patrol of U-869, 307 dirt darts, 200, 202-3 dive tables, 195-97
dock builders' union, 88 dolphins, 31 Donitz, Karl:

and training on U-869, 263

U-boat war and, 236-38 dredges, 83, 252 Drozd, Joe, 36-38 Drumbeat,
Operation, 235 dry suits, 86, 297

Andrea Doria dives and, 36-38

in deep-shipwreck diving, 27-30,

36-39

and discovery of U-869, 50 Feldman's death and, 100-101,

196 Kohler's early wreck dives and,

Kohl's accident and, 201 and return trips to U-869, 100,

Dudas, John, 133, 226 Dudley, William, 178-79 Durley Chine, 140
dysentery pills, 75

Eagle's Nest, 40, 327 East Coast:

Carolina dives and, 293-94 U-boat operations on, 54, 235 U-boat
research and, 253, 286 and war patrol of U-869, 309, 326 Eastern Dive
Boat Association, 58 Eastern Sea Frontier War Diaries

(ESFWD), 180-81 electrical cables, electrical wires: Chatterton
entrapped by, 322 and discovery of U-869, 47, 53 and return trips to

U-869, 116-17, 160, 302, 312, 318, 322

of shipwrecks, 31, 34 and training on U-869, 263 embolisms, 26, 201
emotions:

Andrea Doria dives and, 36-38,

112-13 Chatterton's military career and,

73, 82-83

in commercial diving, 87 in deep-shipwreck diving, 24-25,

29-31, 35-39,89-90 and discovery of U-869, 43, 53, 60 and entrapment of
Chatterton,

316 Feldman's death and, 100-101,

103, 106

and heart and respiratory rates, 35, 38

emotions (cont'd)

Kohler's early wreck dives and,

135-36 nitrogen narcosis and, 35-38,

and return trips to U-869, 118-19, 163,313,316 Rouses'accident and, 215
Engelmann, Gisela, 273-76,

283-84, 332-33 English Channel, 329 Enigma, 236-37, 255 escape lung,
escape lungs: date written on, 246-47 eagle and swastika on, 244
explosion of, 245-46, 320 and return trips to U-869,

163-65,243-45 U-boat research and, 184, 243,

246-47

from U-869, 163, 243-47, 320 excellence, 81,90, 122

Feldman, Steve:

death of, 100-109, 113-15, 141,

146-47, 156-57, 196, 226, 240 and discovery of U-869, 43, 53,

60,96

diving skills of, 60, 96-97 physical appearance of, 96-97 retrieving
body of, 104-7, 156-57,

196 and return trips to U-869, 96-97,

99-109, 113-15, 156-58 Skibinski's relationship with, 97,

99-100, 107-8 fight-or-flight instinct, 38 finances:

Andrea Doria dives and, 206

of Chatterton, 66, 68, 72, 83-86,

88, 188-89

Chatterton's grandfather and, 69 in deep-shipwreck diving, 27 and
discovery of U-869, 20, 42, 56 of Kohler, 136, 138, 142, 185, 293 of
Nagle, 8-9, 206, 226 of Neuerburg, 264 and return trips to U-869, 240

ofSkeets, 13 trimixand, 195, 211 U-boat research and, 142,

147_48, 188-89 fin keepers, 27 fins:

in deep-shipwreck diving, 27, 33 Kohler's early wreck dives and,

132 and return trips to U-869,

160-61,219,221,314,317 Rouses'deaths and, 219, 221 fishing:

Kohler's childhood and, 129, 132,

303 for scallops, 83-85, 90, 105,

252 shipwrecks and, 12-14, 19,

Skeetsand, 12-16, 19 trolling technique in, 13-14 fishing lines, 30
fishing nets, 83-84 flashlights:

in deep-shipwreck diving, 27,

33 and return trips to U-869, 314,

319,321

Flemish Cap, 256, 309 flooding vents, 53 Florida, 135

Chatterton's life in, 83 Kohler's childhood and, 128-29,

131-32

tri mix and, 195

U-boat research and, 149, 152 Fort Hamilton, 82 4th Battalion 31st
Infantry, 74-82 Fowler, USS, 257 Fox Glass, 131-32, 138-39, 329 France,
179,237,257,270,274 furniture, 34-35

Garden City, N.Y."  68, 70-71 Garden City High School, 71-73 Garrick,
Lloyd, 43, 114 gas embolism (pulmonary baro-trauma), 26

Gatto, Steve:

Kohl's accident and, 201 and return trips to U-869, 157-60,
169,213,241, 244-45, 247-49 gauges, 27

Andrea Doria dives and, 37 in deep-shipwreck diving, 35 and discovery
of U-869, 45 eagles and swastikas etched on,

248 and entrapment of Chatterton,

316-17

Feldman's death and, 102 Kohler's childhood and, 127 and return trips
to U-869, 102,

241,248-49, 316-17, 321 and training on U-869, 263 U-boat research and,
93-94 Gentile, Gary, 294 Germans, Germany: Allied invasion of, 237
Kohler's heritage and, 120,

122-23, 129, 140, 170,208-9, 292, 333

Kohler's trip to, 330-35 media portrayal of, 123 Neuerburg's politics
and, 265 Oktoberfest in, 296 San Diego and, 132 see also U-boats
Gestapo, 275-76 G.I. Bill, 85 Gibraltar, 270, 308-9, 324, 326,

329,331, 334 U-boat research and, 253-57,

285-86

Gilgo Beach, 68 Gimbel, Peter, 36 Gimbels Hole, 36 gloves:

and discovery of U-869, 48 Kohler's early wreck dives and,

neoprene, 27, 86 gold, 185-86, 188 goody bags, 27, 109

and discovery of U-869, 46, 51

and return trips to U-869, 117-18, 164, 166-67,211, 246,248, 304,313,
321 Gotenhafen, 272 granny lines, 30 grapples:

in deep-shipwreck diving, 27,

and discovery of U-869, 44-46 and return trips to U-869, 99,

115, 199,204

Great Britain, 192, 329, 332 Berlin bombed by, 259, 275-76 and
Neuerburg's career as fighter pilot, 264

psychological warfare of, 267 U-boat research and, 230-32,

253-54

U-boats attacked by, 270 Great Scotland Yard, 230-32, 254 Greece, 327

Grumman Widgeons, 152 Grutzemacher, Charlie, 172, 174,

Guglieri, Pete, 112-13, 138 Guschewski, Herbert, 266-68,

278-80

and bombing of Stettin, 278-79 and celebration on U-869,

272-73 and commissioning of U-869,

261-62

illnesses of, 334 Kohler's visit with, 333-35 sense of humor of, 268
and theft on U-869, 280, 334 and training on U-869, 266-67 U-869
posting of, 259-60, 272 Guschewski, Willi, 262 Gustafson, USS, 227-30

Halifax, 229

hallucinations, 24, 106-7 Hamburg, 262, 330-33 hammers, 27, 314

see also sledgehammers hand grenades, 76 "Happy Times," 235, 237

Harbor Inn, 64, 241, 297, 326-27 ambience and physical appearance of,
11-12 Nagleand, 11-12, 14-16,241,

Havana, 187 headlights:

in deep-shipwreck diving, 27, 33 and discovery of U-869, 46-47,

hearing, 31 Hela, 271,273 helicopters, 103-4

Chatterton's military career and,

74-76, 79 Cobra attack, 79 and deaths of Rouses, 217,

220-23

Huey medevac, 79 Kohl's accident and, 201-2 and return trips to U-869,
217,

220-23

helium, 194-96 helms, 7, 32 Helper, Paul, 60, 96-97 Henrique, 8
Hessler, Gunter, 170 high-frequency direction finding (Huff-Duff)
(HF/DF), 236 Hildemann, John:

and discovery of U-869, 43-45, 53 retrieving Feldman's body and,

History Channel, 328 Hitler, Adolf, 60, 117, 122-23, 141,

209, 272-76, 333 attempted assassination of, 273 Brandt's jokes about,
270 Kohler's childhood and, 123, 129 and media on U-869, 146 Nedel on,
273-74 and training on U-869, 263 U-boat research and, 185-86 Hitler's
Lost Sub, 328 Hitler Youth, 269, 274 Holocaust Memorial Museum,

327-28 hoods, 27

Horenburg, Martin, 329-30 and bombing of Stettin, 279 identification
of, 168-69, 171-75,

and illness of Guschewski, 334 knife of, 168-69, 171-74, 223,

226-27, 286, 295, 330 and return trips of divers to

U-869, 287

and training on U-869, 266-67 U-boat research and, 172-75,
182,226-29,231,253-54, 258, 285-86 U-869 posting of, 260 horseshoe
crabs, 127 Hudson City Savings Bank, 296 Hudson Senior High School,
128-30 Huey medevac helicopters, 79 hunter-killer groups, 308-9
hypothermia, 29

Iceland, 306-8

identifying tags:

and return trips to U-869, 98, 162-65, 168, 198-99,203-6,
208-9,211,241,248,250, 286-88,290,301,317,319, 321,323,327 U-boat
research and, 94-95, 207,

209,317 of U-853, 299-301

Indian Ocean, 153, 171, 191

Indiscret, L\ 257

insects, 77

International Submarine Document Center, 172

Iron Coffins (Werner), 143

Iron Cross, 300-301

Israel, 327-28

Jacobi Medical Center, 223-24 Jamaica Bay, 124 Japan, 153

Chatterton's military career in, 73-75, 78

U-boat research and, 188 Jaws, 202 jellyfish, 39, 127

Jersey Shore, NJ."  42, 253 ]ohn]ack, 327 jon lines, 27 judgment,
23-25, 36

Kean University, 328

Keatts, Henry, 146, 153, 299-300

Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC),

231 Kessler, Ludwig, 262-63, 271-72,

Key West, Fla."  90 Klein, Howard, 40, 327 knife, knives, 27, 29-31

Andrea Doria dives and, 36-37 in commercial diving, 87 in
deep-shipwreck diving, 89 of Horenburg, 168-69, 171-74,

223, 226-27, 286, 295, 330 Kohler's childhood and, 127 Kohler's early
wreck dives and,

132, 135 and return trips to U-869, 166,

168-69, 171,204,319 U-boat research and, 172-74,

226-27, 254 Kohl, Lew, 200-203 Kohler, Carrie Bassetti, 330 Kohler,
Felicia Becker, 139, 252-53,

288-91,293,295 Kohler, Frances Ruoti, 120-22,

127-28, 130 Kohler, Frank, 129-30 Kohler, Nikki, 329 Kohler, Richard,
120-31, 137-40 boating of, 121, 123-27, 133,

140, 287, 303 childhood of, 122 heritage of, 122-23 scuba diving of,
125, 127 son employed by, 131, 137 son's break with, 137-39 son's
childhood and, 120-29, 133,

140, 287, 292, 302-3, 333 son's reconciliation with, 139 Kohler,
Richie, ix-xi, 108-40 alcohol consumed by, 129, 134, 137,
170,250,288,290

ambitions of, 121, 124, 127,

130-31,240 Andrea Doria dives and, 109-14,

131-33, 140, 169-70,240 artifacts and, 109-10, 114,

132-36, 154-55, 158-59,

164-65, 167, 170,209-12,

249, 290, 335 in attempting to enlist in Navy,

130-31, 140 Bielenda's relationship with, 61,

brawling of, 125, 128-30 Chatterton's relationship with, 61,

109-15, 118-19, 154, 158-59,

163, 165-66, 169-71, 175,

184-86, 197-98,208,240,

242, 246, 250-52, 288-93,

296-99,303,311-12,317-20,

323, 328 and Chatterton's trips to Germany,

175,184-85 childhood of, 120-29, 131-33,

140, 208-9, 240, 287, 292,

302-3, 333

cigarettes smoked by, 224 and date on escape lung, 246 diet of, 166,
185,224,232,

293 and discovery of U-869, 60-62,

234 on disturbing human remains,

207-9 diving given up by, 289-91, 293,

295 diving skills of, x, 60-61, 108,

114, 125, 127, 129, 134-40,

167 drowning victims observed by,

124-27

drugs used by, 129 early boating experiences of, 121,

123-27, 133,287,303 early wreck diving of, 132-39 education of, 123,
128-30,

135-36, 167 and entrapment of Chatterton,

316-18,322

Kohler, Richie (cont'd)

and fallen fuel tank in U-869,

304-5,311-16,319,321 father's break with, 137-39 father's
reconciliation with, 139 Feldman's death and, 108, 157 finances of,
136, 138, 142, 185,

293 in glass repair business, x, 131,

137-39, 142, 175,231,253,

255, 288, 293, 295-97, 329 heritage of, 120, 122-23, 129,

140, 170,208-9,292,333 high school prank of, 130-31 and identifying
tags from U-853,

299-301

after identifying U-869, 327-35 Kohl's accident and, 200-201 love life
of, 137, 139,252-53,

288-91,293,295-97,299,

328-30 in mistaking U-857 for U-869,

239,252,256 Nagle's death and, 251-52 Nagle's relationship with, 111,

113, 140

Nagle's suicide threats and, 226 nickname of, 139 physical appearance
of, 114, 122,

128-29, 158, 186, 197,297 and positive identification of

U-869, 323-24, 328-29 reading of, 120-23, 125, 131,

133, 140, 142, 170, 173, 192,

234-35,253,291-92,329 and return trips to U-869, 108-9,

113-20, 140, 158-59, 163-67,

169-70, 195-201,203-6,

209-12, 216-24, 239-40, 242,

247-51, 253, 286-88, 290-91,

297-99,301-4,311-23,327 risks of deep-shipwreck diving listed by, 312

Rouses and, 203-4, 216-24, 240 and sinking of U-869, 326 suicide
considered by, 289-90 and theories on U-869, 185-93,

209, 247

trimixand, 195-97, 199,224,

240, 242 trips to Washington of, 189, 192,

225-29, 253-58, 292 trip to Germany of, 330-35 U-boat book collection
of, 234 U-boat research and, 142-43, 147-48, 154-55, 157, 165, 170-71,
173, 175, 184-86, 188-93, 199,212,224-35, 237-40,242,247-48,251,
253-58, 285-87, 290-92, 298-301,332 waterskiing of, 124 Krahe, Erich,
233 Kristiansand, 306

Lachenmeyer, John, 139

Lacko, John "Ace," 77-80

La Guardia, Fiorello, 151

Lakehurst, NJ."  150

laminated decompression tables, 27

Lander, Barb:

and return trips to U-869, 213, 218-23

Rouses' deaths and, 218-23

U-boat research and, 255, 257 land mines, 80 Laos, 74-81 Leander,
Zarah, 282 Leonhard, Dieter, 148-49 Levittown, Pa."  293 Leyte Gulf,
Battle of, 129 life jackets, 209, 220 lift bags, 27

and return trips to U-869, 241, 304

Texas Tower dives and, 17-18 Lisa Frances, 125-26 Lloyd, Kathleen,
180-82 lobster traps, 84 logs:

Carolina dives and, 294

and return trips to U-869, 166, 242

of U-l 58, 189 Lombardo, Steve, 43, 103 Lone Wolf Pictures, 329

Long Island, N.Y."  56-58, 60, 131,

253 Chatterton's childhood in, 68,

70-71 loran:

and discovery of U-869, 16,21,

43,45

and return trips to U-869, 98, 176 Lusitania, 294 LZ West, 74-76

McBeth, Will, 323 McDougal, Steve, 114,213 machine guns, 75, 77
machinery:

and discovery of U-869, 53 and return trips to U-869, 115, 160, 162,
166,298,312,316, 319-20

and sinking of U-869, 325-26 U-boat research and, 94 McMahon, Mark:

and discovery of U-869, 43,

53-54 retrieving Feldman's body and, "

106-7

Maine Coasters, 8 Manasquan, NJ."  107 Manhattan, N.Y.:

Chatterton's commercial diving career and, 86-87, 328 Feldman's home
in, 96-97 U-boat research and, 233 manifolds, 27, 35 maps, 166

Marine Corps, U.S."  71 marine life, 105-7 Andrea Doria dives and, 131
Carolina dives and, 294 Chatterton's scallop-fishing boat employment
and, 83-85, 90, 252 deep-shipwreck diving and, 29,

31-33,39

and discovery of U-869, 47-49, 54 Kohler's childhood and, 127, 129,

Kohler's early wreck dives and, 134

retrieving Feldman's body and,

106-7 and return trips to U-869, 162,

202,211,247,319 shipwrecks and, 12-14, 19, 124 Skeetsand, 12-16, 19
U-boat research and, 94 Marine Park, N.Y."  120-28 marker buoys (safety
sausages), 27 Marks, Valentina, 296-97,

328-29

Maryland, 55, 329 masks:

Andrea Doria dives and, 109-10 in commercial diving, 86 in
deep-shipwreck diving, 27, 33 and discovery of U-869, 45 Feldman's
death and, 105 Kohler's childhood and, 127 Kohler's early wreck dives
and,

and return trips to U-869, 100, 103, 105,200,219-21, 247-48,302,312,322
Rouses'deaths and, 219-21 media, 92, 153, 328-29 on Bielenda, 57
Chatterton's commercial diving career and, 85 and discovery of U-869,
144-47,

149, 151, 170, 175,334 international, 208, 329, 334 Kohler's childhood
and, 123-25,

127 Kohler's early wreck dives and,

portrayal of Germans in, 123 and return trips to U-869, 240 U-boat
research and, 191, 229 medics, 73-83 Mediterranean Sea, 260 mercury,
188-89 Merten, Karl-Friedrich:

and Chatterton's trip to Germany,

death of, 247

Horenburg's identity and, 172, 174, 182

Merten, Karl-Friedrich (cont'd) and theories on L/-869, 186-88,

191,206

U-boat research and, 153-54, 171,205-6,247

Middletown, NJ."  290, 292

Mill Basin, 124

Miller, Glenn, 267

mines, 80, 132

minnows, 127

Mohawk, SS, 10, 88

Moltenort, U-boat Memorial in, 182

Monmouth County, NJ."  150

Montauk, N.Y."  13

Monte Cassino, Battle of, 272

motor skills and coordination: in deep-shipwreck diving, 23-25,

and Feldman's death, 105 andtrimix, 194, 199-200

Mouse, 75-76, 78, 80

mowing the lawn, 44

Murphy, Ed, 131-34

Museum of Science and Industry, ix, 65-67, 93-95

muskets, 83

Nagle, Bill, 3-12, 14-21

alcohol consumed by, 4, 10-12, 15-16, 51-52, 57,62,91-92, 111, 156,
168-69, 197-98, 210-11,226,251,327

ambitions of, 8-10

Andrea Doria dives and, 7-11, 18-19, 52, 56,90, 109-13, 158,
169,206,241,251

Bielenda's relationship with, 57-58,61, 110, 112

and building of Seeker, 4

charter-boat business of, 10-11, 17,56-58,89,91-92, 109-10,
140,206,226,251

and Chatterton's fascination with shipwrecks, 89

Chatterton's relationship with, 16-20, 52,89,91-92,98, 109, 111,
113,210-11,226,243, 251-52

and Chatterton's relationship with

Kohler, 114 claim-jumping fears and, 56, 58,

98, 104-5, 107, 141, 143-44,

courage of, 5-6, 11, 19, 57 death of, 251-52 deep-shipwreck diving
skills of,

4-11, 16-17,44, 56 demeanor of, 10-11 and discovery of U-869, 14-16,

19-21,42-45, 51-52, 55-56,

58, 60, 62-64, 97 diving motives of, 4-5, 7, 9, 11, 19 on explosive
ascents, 216 fame of, 5,7,9, 11, 17, 19,

56-57,89,97, 140, 251 Feldman's death and, 103-7, 109,

156-57,226

finances of, 8-9, 206, 226 Harbor Inn and, 11-12, 14-16,

241,327

illnesses of, 197,210,251 intellect of, 6, 8, 19 knowledge of boats of,
6-8, 19 Kohler's relationship with, 111,

113, 140

Kohl's accident and, 201-2 and media on U-869, 144-45, 151 oath broken
by, 62-63 physical appearance of, 4, 11, 52,

169, 197-98, 241,243,251 reputation of, 56-58, 140 and return trips
to

U-869, 98,

103-9, 113-14, 117-18,

141-42, 157-59, 165-69,

197-98, 201-4,210-11,241,

243-45,248-49,251 Rouses and, 204, 226 secret code of, 16 sense of
humor of, 169 Skeets's relationship with, 14-16,

19-20

suicide considered by, 226 Texas Tower and, 17-18 trustworthiness of,
16 U-boat research and, 64-65, 143, 151,197-98,225-26

Nantucket, Mass."  7 National Archives and Records Administration
(N.A.): Kohler's visit to, 189, 192 U-boat research and, 64, 189,

192,255-56

National Geographic, 120 Naval Historical Center (NHC): archives of,
180-82, 187-88 Chatterton's visits to, 175-82,

187-89

U-boat research and, 142-43, 150, 175-82, 187-89,225-29, 257

Naval Institute, 142, 229 Naval Weapons Station Earle,

150-51

navigation, navigational charts, 236 in deep-shipwreck diving, 26-27,

33-34, 38 Kohler's childhood and, 124-25,

128 and return trips to U-869,

166-67, 171, 198-99, 322 U-boat research and, 95 "

and war patrol of U-869, 309 see also loran; radar; sonar Navy, U.S.:

Chatterton's grandfather and, 69,

convoys run by, 235 Kohler's attempt to enlist in,

130-31, 140

U-boat research and, 65, 142-43, 149-52, 175-82, 187-89, 225-29, 235,
255-57 Nazi Party, 269-75

anti-Semitism and, 265, 275 Brandts and, 269-71 and celebration on
U-869, 272 Nedel on, 273-75 Neuerburg and, 261, 263-65,

272-73

Nedel, Franz, 273-76, 332-33 as apprentice butcher, 274 last family
visit of, 283-84, 333 musical talent of, 273-74 politics of, 273-75

and training on U-869, 273, 276 U-boats as fascination of, 274 war
patrol and, 284 Neuerburg, Erna Maas, 265,

281-83, 331-32 Neuerburg, Friedhelm, 264-66,

331-33 Neuerburg, Helmuth, 261-69,

331-32

in Agru-Front testing, 271-72 ambitions of, 263-64 artistic talent of,
264 and bombing of Stettin, 279 Brandt's relationship with,

268-69,271,277-78,281 and celebration on U-869, 272-73 character of,
262-64, 267-68,

271-73

childhood of, 264 and commissioning of U-869,

261-62

education of, 264 as fighter pilot, 261, 263-64 finances of, 264 honors
and awards of, 264 and illness-of Guschewski, 334 musical talent of,
264, 273, 334 Nedel's respect for, 276 physical appearance of, 261,
271,

277-78,281

politics of, 261, 263-65, 272-73 private life of, 265-66, 281-83
rerouting order missed by, 308-9,

326 and return trips of divers to

U-869, 287, 327 and sinking of U-869, 325 and theft on U-869, 279-80
and training on U-869, 267, 271 transfer to U-boat service of, 261,

263-66,281

U-boat research and, 255-56, 285 war patrol and, 281-83, 306-10,

326 Neuerburg, Jtirgen, 266, 281,

331-32

Neuerburg, Jutta, 266, 281-82 Neuschwanstein Castle, 296

Newark Star-Ledger, 145-46, 149,

Newfoundland, 256, 309 New Jersey, 8, 62-66, 77, 299, 328,

330-31,333-35 Carolina dives and, 294 and discovery of U-869, ix,
42-43, 49, 55,60,62-64,66, 176, 178,331,334

and media on U-869, 144-46 subway cars sunken by, 19 tri mix workshop
in, 195 U-boat research and, 142-43, 150, 152, 171, 173, 185-88,
190,225-26,228-29,231, 246, 285-86 U-521 and, 64-65 U-550 and, 63-64
New Port Richey, Fla."  128 Newsday, 57 New York:

Carolina dives and, 294 and theories on U-869, 206 U-boat research and,
151-52, 154, 190-91,228,233, 253-56 and war patrol of U-869, 306-10,

324, 326

New York Harbor, 86-87 New York Post, 153 Niestle, Axel, 229, 332
nitrogen:

in deep-shipwreck diving, 23-26 retrieving Feldman's body and,

104, 106

and return trips to U-869, 166 tri mix and, 194-96 nitrogen narcosis,
6, 8

Andrea Doria dives and, 36-39 in deep-shipwreck diving, 23-26,

29-33, 36-39

and discovery of U-869, 47-49, 54 emotions and, 35-38, 215 Feldman's
death and, 100-102,

105 Kohler's early wreck dives and,

133 in lost divers, 33-34

and return trips to U-869, 100-102, 105, 164,214-15, 242

Rouses' accident and, 214-15 symptoms of, 23-25, 31-32, 39 tri mix and,
194-95, 198, 200, 242

nitrox, 195

Normandy invasion, 272

Norness, 9-10, 291

Northeast:

Carolina dives and, 294 deep-shipwreck diving in, 26 Kohler's early
wreck dives and,

132-35

Texas Tower and, 53 tri mix and, 195-96

North Sea, 264

Norway, 226, 232

U-boat research and, 286

and war patrol of U-869, 306, 308

Nova, 328-29

off-gassing, 17

Oktoberfest, 296

Olympic Games, 260

Oregon, 58, 240

Kohler's dives to, 133-34

Ostrowski, Ron:

and discovery of U-869, 43, 53 and return trips to U-869, 95

oxygen:

in deep-shipwreck diving, 23-24 Kohl's accident and, 201-2 Rouses'
deaths and, 218, 220 tri mix and, 194, 196

oxygen toxicity, 194

Packer, Tom:

Kohl's accident and, 201 and return trips to U-869, 157-60,
169,213,241, 244-45, 247-49

Pagano, Jeff, 139

Palmer, Billy, 300-301

"Paloma, La," 277

Pan Pennsylvania, 9-10

paralysis, 25

Parker, 59, 62

pattern torpedoes, 324 PBS,328-29 pelagics, 13-14 penetration reels,
105-6 peripheral vision:

nitrogen narcosis and, 215

tri mix and, 194, 242 periscope, periscopes:

and return trips to U-869, 116, 205

U-boat research and, 95

of U-869, 266, 278, 290, 310, 331 Pillau, 277-78 pipes, pipe fittings,
plumbing:

in commercial diving, 88

in deep-shipwreck diving, 31, 33

and discovery of U-869, 47, 53

and return trips to U-869, 116-17,312,319-20

of shipwrecks, 31, 34-35

of U-505, 93-94 pistols, 252, 297 45-caliber, 75-76, 80 380, 84, 90

Place, George, 40-41 -"

Plokhoy, Glen, 111-12 pocket watches, 283 pollack, 13-14 pony bottles,
36-37 Popular Mechanics, 120 Port Authority Heliport, 86 portholes,
32

Premauer, Rudolf, 232-33 Princeton University, 42 problem solving, 86
Proceedings, 229 propellers, 32

and return trips to U-869, 115

of submarines, 48 psychological warfare, 267 pulmonary baro trauma (gas
embolism), 26

radar:

and discovery of U-869, 21

in U-boat war, 235-36 radio, radios, 93, 126, 190-91

and crew of U-869, 260

and discovery of U-869, 21 Feldman's death and, 104-5 Neuerburg's
private life and, 265 and return trips to U-869, 212,

Rouses' deaths and, 222 single side-band, 21 and training on U-869,
266-67 two-way, 40 U-boat research and, 254-55,

257-58, 285-86, 332 in U-boat war, 236 VHS, 21 and war patrol of U-869,
306-9,

see also navigation, navigational charts

Radio Calais, 267, 334

Raeder, Erich, 264

rebreathers, 327

recompression chambers, 221, 223-24

Reeperbahn, 262

regulators, 327

Andrea Doria dives and, 36-37 in deep-shipwreck diving, 27, 31 and
discovery of U-869, 45, 51 Feldman's death and, 100, 102-4 Kohler's
childhood and, 125 Kohler's early wreck dives and,

Kohl's accident and, 201 and return trips to U-869, 100, 102-4,
162,200-201,217, 315,321-23 Rouses' deaths and, 217

Relief, 133

Resor, 133, 140

Reuben James, USS, 227

Rhode Island, 91, 124, 184

rice paddies, 77

rifles, 75, 80

Roberts, Doug:

bleeding of, 103-4 and discovery of U-869, 43, 53 Feldman's death and,
101-5 and return trips to U-869, 95, 101-5

Rockaway Inlet, 124

roll training, 266

Rooney, Pat, 139

Rostin, Erwin, 189-91,206

Rouse, Chris:

artifacts collected by, 210, 212-13 death of, 216-24, 226, 240
explosive ascent of, 216-17, 220 physical appearance of, 203 retrieving
equipment of, 224 and return trips to U-869, 203-4,

206, 209-24 son's accident and, 215-16, 220

Rouse, Chrissy:

artifacts collected by, 210, 212-15 death of, 216-24, 226, 240
explosive ascent of, 216-17, 220 physical appearance of, 203 retrieving
equipment of, 224 and return trips to U-869, 203-4,

206, 209-24

underwater entrapment of, 214-16,218,220,224

rudders, 32, 48

running-a-line technique, 214-15

Ruoti, Rosalie, 128

saddle tanks:

and return trips to U-869,

158-59

U-boat research and, 150 safety sausages (marker buoys), 27 Sakai,
Norman, 81 San Diego, USS, 56, 88, 240

Kohler's dives to, 132-33 sand sweeps, 105-6 scallops, scallop-fishing
boats,

83-85, 90, 105, 252 Scotty's Steakhouse, 207, 224-25, 232, 237, 288-90,
292, 296-98, 328 scuba diving:

buddy system and, 30 casualties in, 8, 11, 17-18 cave diving and, 203
Chatterton's childhood and, 70 and Chatterton's fascination with
shipwrecks, 89

Chatterton's scallop-fishing boat employment and, 84 Chatterton's
skills in, 88-89 dangers in, 5-6, 8 decompression in, 11 equipment in,
5, 70, 84, 96, 125,

127, 129, 132-33, 179 Feldman's skills in, 96 Kohler's early
experiences with,

125, 127, 129 Kohler's early wreck dives and,

off-gassing in, 17 Texas Tower and, 17-18 trimixand, 194, 197 U-boat
research and, 179 see also deep-shipwreck diving,

deep-shipwreck divers sea anemones:

in deep-shipwreck diving, 33 and discovery of U-869, 47 U-boat research
and, 94 sea bass, 14, 16 Sea Hunt, 127, 197 Sea Hunter, 7 Sebastian,
291 Seeker, 3-4, 8-12, 89-92, 140-41,

296, 326-27, 330 aluminum ladder of, 52 Andrea Doria dives and, 8-9,

18-19,36, 109-12,206 as charter-boat for divers, 9-10,

17 and Chatterton's fascination with shipwrecks, 89 Chatterton's
management of,

claim-jumping fears and, 141 and deaths of Rouses, 216-23 and discovery
of U-869, 15,

20-21,42-46,50-52, 54-56,

58-61,66, 114,327 fame of, 97, 144,210 Feldman's death and, 102-5,

156-57

after identifying U-869, 327 and media on U-869, 144-46 Nagle's
purchase of, 8

physical appearance of, 4, 10, 15,

reputation of, 56-57 and return trips to U-869, 97-99, 102-7, 115, 118,
141, 157-59, 165, 167, 169, 197-98, 200-202,206,209-13,
216-23,239,241,243, 245-51,301,318 Texas Tower and, 17-18 U-boat
research and, 64 Segal, Mr."  122-23, 140, 292, 333 self-rescue, 31
S-5, 55 shackles, 87 Sharkhunters International, 149,

158, 171-72 sharks, 129

deep-shipwreck diving and, 29, 39 and return trips to U-869, 202
Sheard, Brad, 114, 139, 168 Shipwreck Grill, 326-27 shipwrecks, 12-23

artifacts recovered from, 4-9,

18-19 Chatterton's fascination with,

88-89 Chatterton's scallop-fishing boat employment and, 83 controlling
emotions in, 38-39 dead divers in, 22 in educating divers, 91
entanglements in, 35-38 Feldman's fascination with, 96-97 fishing and,
12-14, 19, 124 getting lost in, 33-36, 38 Kohler's childhood and, 124
Kohler's early dives and, 132-39 Nagle's insights on, 7 physical
appearance of, 31-32 secrets inside of, 90-91 Skeetsand, 12-16, 19-21
visibility in, 33-38 working inside of, 32-38 working outside of, 32
see also deep-shipwreck diving,

deep-shipwreck divers shirts, 209-10

Shoe, Dick, 42-43, 53, 114 shoes:

and return trips to U-869, 205,

248-49

U-boat research and, 234 signal flares, 243-44 silt:

in commercial diving, 86

in deep-shipwreck diving, 33-35,

and discovery of U-869, 52 Kohler's early wreck dives and,

132-33

and return trips to U-869, 159, 162, 164, 166-67,214,242,
248,302-4,312,316-21, 327

silverware, 39, 166-69, 171-74, 223, 226-27, 245, 286, 295, 330
Skeets:

charter-boat business of, 12-16,

19 Nagle's relationship with, 14-16,

19-20

shipwrecks^ and 12-16, 19-21 Skerry, Brian, 20 Skibinski, Paul:

and discovery of U-869, 43, 53 Feldman's death and, 100-103,

105-8 Feldman's relationship with, 97,

99-100, 107-8 and return trips to U-869, 95-97,

99-103, 105-8 Skin Diver, 85 sledgehammers, 27

in Andrea Doria dives, 113 in deep-shipwreck diving, 89 Kohler's early
wreck dives and,

135 and return trips to U-869,

319-21

Snap-On Tools, 4, 8 sniper fire, 80 snorkels, 105 snowball effect, 136
Snow White, 282

sonar, 93

U-boat research and, 257

in U-boat war, 236 "Sour-Pickle Time" (Sauregurkenzeit),

155,237

South Carolina, 69, 206-7 South Street, 86 Soviet Union, 237
spare-parts boxes, 301-2

and return trips to U-869, 302, 304,311,317-23

U-boat research and, 317

of LJ-853, 301 speaker tubes, 93, 117 spearfishing, 129, 132 Sperry,
67

Spiegel, 329, 330, 334 Spihefish, 62, 115-16 Stettin, 274, 278-80, 334
Stockholm, 7 StoltDagali, 10,327 stopwatches, 27 stripers, 303 strobe
lights:

in deep-shipwreck diving, 27

and discovery of U-869, 46, 49, 53

retrieving Feldman's body and, 106

and return trips to U-869, 163 stroke, 25-26 Struma, 328 submarines,
53-55

attack, 130

bows of, 48, 54

Chatterton's grandfather and, 69

conning towers of, 55

diving systems of, 53

of Germany, see U-boats history of, 234

nuclear, 130

sterns of, 48

teamwork on, 69

of U.S."  55,62, 115-16 Suffolk County, N.Y."  70-71 surgeon's kit,
249-50 switches, 53, 93

tablecloths, 34-35 tag lines, 40

technical diving, 195, 204 telegraphs, 32, 241,249 Tenth Fleet U-boat
intelligence summaries, 255-56 Terzuoli, Joe "Captain Zero," 62-63,

327 Texas Tower, 88

retrieving drowned diver from,

17-18,90 visibility at, 53 Texel, 9-10, 61,294 Thugs:

Kohler's early wreck dives and,

133-36 official name of, see Atlantic

Wreck Divers Thunderfish, 300 tie-ins:

and discovery of U-869, 44-45 and return trips to U-869, 98,

159, 170,209,302 securing grapples and, 29 tigers, 77 Titanic, 327
Tolten, 10

torpedoes, 198, 268, 278 in Agru-Front testing, 271 circle-runner,
232-33, 324-25 and discovery of U-869, 162 history of, 234

and return trips to U-869, 162 and sinking of U-869, 324-25 and
training on U-869, 266 types of, 324 U-boat research and, 151, 155,

232-35 of U-J58, 190

of U-869, 47-49, 53-54, 324 torpedo hatches, torpedo tubes,

torpedo tube hatches, 94 and return trips to U-869, 158-59, 162-64,
198-99, 204-6

U-boat research and, 150 of U-869, 52-53,99, 115, 198-99,204-6,292,
325

Trenton, NJ."  293 tri mix 194-201

advantages of, 194-95, 198-200,

240, 242

brewing of, 195-96 after identifying U-869, 327 Kohl's accident and,
200-201 potential downsides of, 195-97,

and return trips to U-869, 195-201,204,211,213,216, 224,242,311 Rouses
and, 204, 211,216 trolling technique, 13-14 tuna:

in deep-shipwreck diving, 31 fishing for, 12-14

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 125 249th General Hospital, 73-75, 78 '

U-boat, The, 55, 60 U-boat Archive, 148, 172, 183, 285 U-boat Control,
German (BdU): U-boat research and, 180, 187,

225,254-56,258,285, 332 and war patrol of U-869, 306-10,

326 U-boats, ix, 274

Allied war against, 155, 234-38,

266, 270

Brandt's transfer to, 270-71 cargoes of, 185, 188-89 construction of,
212 crews of, 191-93, 237-38, 242,

dangers of, 265-66 dying in, 192-93 fame of, 235 films on, 54, 62, 296
German Memorial for, 174-75,

"Happy Times" of, 235, 237 Kohler's childhood and, 124, 127,

129 living conditions on, 93-94, 155,

309 Neuerburg's transfer to, 261,

263-66, 281

research of divers on, 55, 60, 63-67,93-96,98, 116-17, 142-43, 147-55,
157, 159, 161, 165-66, 170-94, 197-99, 205-7,209,212,224-35, 237-40,
242-43, 245-48, 251, 253-58, 285-87, 290-92, 298-301, 317, 332

resupply, 190

"Sour-Pickle Time" and, 155, 237

statistics on, 54-55, 234-35, 237, 266

toilet flushing on, 94

trash disposal and, 94

Type VII, 158-59, 184,260

Type IX, 158, 163, 171, 184, 187, 191-92,205-6, 225,271

Type IXC, 65, 211-12, 224

Type IXD, 192, 205

TypeIXD2, 153

on U.S. East Coast, 54, 235

wolf packs of, 151 U-boat War in the Atlantic,

1939-1945, The (Hessler), 170

U-108, 270 .  U-151, 294 U-157, 187 U-l 58, 187-92

attack report for, 187-89

Chatterton's research on, 197-98, 247

Kohler's research on, 189-91, 247

Yurga's research on, 191-92, 206,

247 U-505, ix

Chatterton's research on, 65-66, 93-95, 116-17,245

diesel motor room of, 94

officers' quarters of, 95

size of, 93 U-521, 64-65 U-550, 55, 63-65 U-602:

commissioning dinner for, 262

Guschewski's transfer from, 259-60, 262, 272

U-85J, 172, 186-88, 191-92, 205-6 cargo of, 188 Chatterton's research
on, 187-88,

191, 197-98 mission of, 153-54, 171 size of, 205

war patrols of, 186-87, 191 Yurga on, 192 U-853:

electric motor room of, 301 identifying tags of, 299-301 location of
sinking of, 91, 124,

184,299-300 removal of human bone from,

91-92

U-857, 226-34, 246-47 Bredow on, 232-33 Coppockon, 231-32 crew of,
233

and date on escape lung, 246 Grutzemacher on, 232 Merten on, 247
mistaking U-869 for, 239, 246,

252,256,286

reports on sinking of, 227-32 theories on, 232-33 U-869:

aft torpedo room of, 163-65,

198-200,209

Agru-Front testing of, 271-72 antiaircraft gun of, 266 atmosphere on,
272 binoculars from, 247-48, 250 boots from, 142-43, 243 bow of, 48,
54, 99 celebration on, 272-73 Chatterton and, 19-21, 42-56,

58-60, 63-66, 93-95, 98-99,

103-7, 113-19, 141-213,

216-35,237-58,285-305,

311-30,332 china from, 117-18, 141, 143-46,

154-55, 158-61, 164-67, 313 chronometer from, 250 claim-jumping fears
and, 56,

58-63,98, 104-5, 107, 141,

143-44, 155 collectors' interest in, 147-48

cologne bottle from, 167

commander's quarters of, 242-43, 247, 250

commissioning of, 259, 261-62, 266, 284

conning tower of, 99, 116-17, 178,205,260,277-78,325

construction of, 212, 271

control room of, 159-60, 163, 199

Coppock's research on, 253-55

crew of, 168-69, 171-75, 182, 223, 226-29, 253-54, 256,
258-64,266-69,271-76, 278-87, 292, 295-96, 302, 308-10, 318, 324-26,
328-34

dangers of, 53, 114-15, 157, 160, 239-40, 286, 295, 302-5,
311-14,316-18,320-23,330

depth of wreckage of, 44-46, 51-54

at Deschimag-Bremen shipyard, 259-63

deterioration of, 53

diesel motor room of, 241, 244-45, 247-49, 278, 298,
301-4,311,314-19,321-23, 325

discovery of, ix, 14-16, 19-21, 23, 42-56, 58-66,96-97,99, 114, 144-49,
151, 162, 170, 175-76, 178, 187,234,252, 314,323,327,331,334

documentaries on, 328-29

electric motor room of, 241, 244, 249,278,298,301-4, 311-12, 314-15,
317-22,331

escape lung from, 163, 243-47, 320

escape trunk of, 249, 298, 301-4

fallen fuel tank in, 304-5, 311-17, 319-22

flooding vents of, 53

forward torpedo room of, 161-62, 165, 178, 198-99,203-5,211

hatches of, 47-48, 52-53, 55, 99, 115-17, 160-62, 164, 198-99,
204-5,263, 271,292,315, 317,319,322,325-26

hole in side of, 99, 115-17, 150-51, 198-99,214, 302

hull of, 46, 48-49, 53

human remains on, 161-67, 199, 207-10,214,242,248,296

identification of, x, 48-49, 51-56, 58,60,62-65,93-99, 107, 115-19,
141-55, 157, 159-65, 168-69, 171-94, 196-98, 204-14, 224-35, 237-50,
252-58,285-95,298-301, 311,315,317,323-24, 327-29

inside of, 47-48, 52-55, 99-100, 115-17, 150, 159-67, 178, 195,
198-200,203-11, 213-15,220,224,239, 241-45, 247-50, 263, 271-72,
278-79, 287, 290, 292, 295-96, 298, 301-5, 311-23, 325-26, 331

insignia and motto of, 282

Kohler and, 60-62, 108-9, 113-20, 140, 142, 154-55, 157-59, 163-67,
169-71, 173,..  175, 184-93, 195-201, 203-12, 216-35, 237-40, 242,
246-58, 285-93, 295-305, 311-23,326-35

living conditions on, 167, 279, 292

location of wreckage of, 16, 19, 21, 141, 143-44, 151-52, 155-57, 174,
176-78, 181, 184-85, 187, 190-91, 253-56, 285-86

mistaking U-857 for, 239, 246, 252, 256, 286

modern German government on, 148-49

music on, 267, 272, 334

Nagle and, 14-16, 19-21, 42-45, 51-52, 55-56, 58,60,62-64, 97-98,
103-9, 113-14, 117-18, 141-45, 151, 155, 157-59, 165-69, 197-98,
201-4,210-11,225-26,241, 243-45,248-49,251

noncommissioned officers'

(NCOs') quarters of, 161, 163, 166-67, 199,205,209-11, 242, 248

oath breaking on, 60-63

officers of, 255-56, 261-73, 276-83,285,287,306-10, 325-27, 330-32,
334

outside of, 46-49, 52-54, 99, 115-17, 150-51, 159-60,
198-99,205-6,214,260, 277-78,284,302,310,330

periscope of, 266, 278, 290, 310, 331

planning dives to, 44, 54, 115, 117, 158-60, 163, 166, 198, 204-5, 213,
241-42, 287-88, 290,295,298, 301-2, 304, 311-15, 318-19,322

press release on, 144-45, 153

rerouting message missed by, 253-54, 256-57, 286, 308-9, 326

return trips of divers to, 95-109, 113-20, 140-42, 156-71, 176, 178,
194.-206,208-24, 239-51,253,286-88,290-91, 293,295,297-99,301-4,
311-23,327,330

seasickness on, 266

shape of, 53,99,310

signal flare from, 243-44

silverware from, 166-69, 171-74, 223, 226-27, 286, 295, 330

sinking of, 150-53, 186, 198-99, 205, 254-57, 285-86, 292, 324-26,
333-34

size of, 192, 197-98, 203-5, 325

as Skeets's secret shipwreck, 14-16, 19-21

stern of, 99, 115

at Stettin, 278-80

survivor of, 333-34

theft on, 279-80, 334

theories on, 185-93, 197-98, 205-6, 209, 247, 286

torpedoes of, 47-49, 53-54, 324

U-869 {cont'd)

torpedo hatches of, 52-53, 99,

115, 198-99, 204-6,292 torpedo-loading tubes of, 53, 325 training on
board, 263-64,

266-69,271-73,276-77 as U-Who, 194, 196-98, 203-4,
206,208-10,223-25,227, 229,231-32,234,238, 240-41, 247, 250-53, 286-87,
290-99,301,304,311, 313-15,318,321,323,326 videotapes of, 115-16, 150,
159-60, 162, 165-66, 171, 176, 178, 198-99,224, 239-40,315,317-19 as
war grave, 161, 164, 166, 177,

179 war patrol of, 174,279-86,

306-10, 324, 326-27 wreath and ribbons affixed to, 330 U-879, 226-27,
229 Ultra, 255

unconsciousness, 26 underwear, polypropylene, 27 UPI, 145 up lines,
27

Vaeth, Gordon, 175-78, 180-81 valves, 30, 36, 53, 93 Verrazano Bridge,
124 Vietnam War, 71-83

casualties of, 71, 73-74, 77-78,

80-82 Chatterton's high school years and, 71-73

Chatterton's military career and, 73-83,85-86,88,200,219,
221,223,230,328 prisoners taken in, 80 protests against, 72 Virginia,
64 visibility:

Andrea Doria dives and, 37-38 Chatterton's commercial diving career
and, 86-87 in deep-shipwreck diving, x-xi, 24, 28, 30-39, 89-90

and discovery of U-869, 46-47, 49, 53

Feldman's death and, 102, 105-6

Kohler's early wreck dives and, 133

and return trips to U-869, 99, 102, 105-6, 117, 158-60, 162-63, 165-67,
198-99,214, 224,242,245,302-3,317, 319-22

at Texas Tower, 53

in Vietnam jungle, 78

see also peripheral vision; silt

Wahoo, 140

Andrea Doria dives and, 110-13 claim-jumping fears and, 144 and
discovery of U-869, 58 retrieving Feldman's body and,

156-57 reputation of, 56-58

wallets, 161

Wantagh South Bay Dive Center, 131

Washington, D.C."  U-boat research in, 64, 142-43, 150, 175-82, 185-89,
192, 194,225-29, 253-58, 292

Washington Navy Yard, 176

Watchung Reservation, 299

waterproof markers, 27

Weekly World News, 146, 186

Weidenfeld, Gregory:

and date on escape lung, 246-47 U-boat research and, 151-53, 206

weight belts, 27

in commercial diving, 87 Kohl's accident and, 201

weightlessness, 31, 39

Weingartner, Hannes, 153-54, 171, 187-88, 191,205-6,247

welding, 86, 88

Werner, Herbert, 143

wet suits, 27, 50, 132-33

whale bones, 84-85

whale skulls, 83-84

whistles, 7

white cups, 29, 45-46

Wolfinger, Kirk, 329

W-1077, 259

Woodstock, N.Y."  84

World Trade Center, terrorist attacks on, 328

World War I, 269-70, 291, 329 Carolina dives and, 293 San Diego dives
and, 132 Texel dives and, 294 World War II, ix-xi, 92-94, 108,

278-82,291,310,329,332 Brandt on, 270 casualties of, ix, xi, 54, 175,
182,

189, 192,234-35,279 Chatterton's grandfather and, 69 and crew of U-869,
259-61 and date on escape lung, 246 and discovery of U-869, 49, 53,

60,62-63, 176 Kohler's childhood and, 123, 125,

128-29, 140

and media on U-869, 144 Nazi Party and, 269 Nedel on, 275 Neuerburg's
private life and, 265,_^

281-82 and return trips to U-869, 115,

161-62, 164, 166,248 U-boat research and, 64-65,

93-94, 147-48, 153-54, 175,

178-83, 185, 188,212,225,

228,233-35,255,257 U-boat war in, 155, 234-38, 266,

U.S. entry into, 265 U.S. submarines in, 55, 62, 115-16

wrist watches, 161

and discovery of U-869, 45-46 and return trips to U-869, 320-22

writing slates, 27

Andrea Doria dives and, 112 and discovery of U-869, 51 and return trips
to U-869, 323

Yad Vashem, 327-28 Yale University, 67, 72 Yardley, Pa."  293 Yurga,
John:

Chatterton's despair and, 295 and discovery of U-869, 43-46,

53-55, 60, 62-63 and fallen fuel tank in U-869,

finances of, 188-89 Kohl's accident and, 200-202 and return trips to

U-869, 95-96,

195-98,200-206,211-13,

241-42,244, 291 shark threat and, 202 and theories on U-869, 186-92,

206, 247

trimixand, 195-97, 201, 240 U-boat research and, 55, 60, 64,

96, 154, 175, 182-92,206,247

Zinten, 269, 271,276-77, 280 Zodiac chase boats, 40

About the Author

Robert Kurson grew up in the Chicago suburbs.  He earned a bachelor's
degree in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, then a law
degree from Harvard Law School.  He practiced real estate law, but quit
to pursue a writing career.  To make ends meet, he worked full-time as
a drapery and window-blinds installer, then as a Wal-Mart options
trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange.  He was hired by the
Chicago Sun-Times as a data-entry clerk, a position that led to a
full-time features writing job.  In 2000, Esquire published "My
Favorite Teacher," his first magazine story, which became a finalist
for a National Magazine Award.  He moved from the Sun-Times to Chicago
magazine, then to Esquire, where he is a contributing editor.  His
stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine,
and other publications.  He lives in the Chicago suburbs and can be
reached via the Internet at www.robertkurson.com.