Free Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson Page B

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 mooks 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 shoehorning 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 sure? 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 wheelhouse. 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