Free Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson

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