Free Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson Page A

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, slingshotting 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,