DJ pulled up to Tap’s house in Greenland and navigated his pickup down the long driveway leading to the Black Dog shop. He was coming off a wild Fourth of July weekend spent with Dana at a friend’s lakefront place in New Hampshire. Now, in the sober morning light, he was feeling a bit groggy. But he was relieved that the long-talked-about tunnel job, which had suffered yet another delay after the mine rescue training, was finally about to begin. First, though, there would be a week of equipment setup and walkthroughs in Tap’s yard before the crews mobilized the Humvees, trailers, and breathing equipment and convoyed from southern New Hampshire down to Deer Island.
Because the Black Dog and Norwesco divers had done their mine rescue training separately, this setup period would give DJ his first opportunity to meet the West Coast divers he would be working alongside in the tunnel. Given the nomadic nature of commercial diving, a certain pride went along with being on your home turf. DJ was eager to take the lead and exercise all his local privileges. He knew the Norwesco team would probably be staying in some crummy motel and trying not to get lost as they drove unfamiliar roads in borrowed cars. Meanwhile DJ lived just an hour away, he was cruising to the job site in his immaculate ’96 Dodge Ram with the chrome wheels and tinted windows, and he knew the best bars up and down the coast.
Before the introductions began, though, Tap pulled DJ aside. Still fuming that Kozlowski had walked off the job a few weeks earlier, Tap had decided it was too late to try to find and train a replacement. They’d simply have to make do with one less man. The Black Dog contingent would consist of DJ, Billy, two young guys who were new to the company, and Tap himself. Tap would not be venturing into the tunnel but instead would be a permanent member of the standby team. Of all these New England guys, DJ had the closest relationship with the Local 56 union office in Boston, so he had been designated as the shop steward, meaning he’d be the union’s voice on the job site. Now, standing in his yard, Tap told DJ he needed him to set a good tone, especially in his dealings with the engineer from Norwesco who would be the project manager. “I know you’re not going to like this guy Harald,” Tap told DJ. “But I need you to do me a favor. Keep your opinions to yourself. Don’t tell him to fuck off.”
DJ laughed. Tap knew him too well. But DJ could also tell how serious Tap was. After all the time and energy he had invested in this job, Tap had to come to terms with the fact that he had very little control over it. He had only recently signed his subcontract with Norwesco, and now all they had to do was get through a few weeks without any blowups. “It’s for the good of the job,” Tap said, “for the good of us.”
DJ had complete trust in Tap and Billy. But when the unfamiliar Norwesco divers showed up, the two camps eyed each other like rival rappers from opposite coasts. Their first task was to unload the Humvees and all the other equipment that had been shipped crosscountry by tractor-trailer. The cylinders of liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen as well as the backup HP compressed air would be delivered shortly by the New Hampshire facility that Harald’s supplier back in Spokane had lined up. DJ figured the morning called for an all-hands-on-deck approach, so he quickly began hauling the heavy gear around. After he and the others had unloaded the equipment and begun shifting to the setup process, Harald, the short boss Tap had warned him about, marched around the yard. DJ didn’t care for the way the guy seemed to strut, with his chest pushed out and his arms curled, as if he had a watermelon under each one. And he didn’t like how particular Harald got about who touched what. DJ sensed that Harald had been content to let him sweat through the heavy work, lugging around hundreds of pounds of gear, but then seemed reluctant to let anyone besides his Norwesco guys do the mentally taxing work of assembling the equipment in the correct manner. DJ was nobody’s bellhop, and he started to seethe. Recalling the promise he’d made to Tap, though, he decided to adopt the can’t-be-bothered attitude of the hired hand that Harald seemed to view him as. If Tap asked him to do something, DJ would jump right on it. Otherwise he hung back and watched.
His frustration increased123 when Norwesco diver Dave Riggs asked him to avoid using foul language around him. Riggs’s accent and his slow speaking cadence made it clear that he’d grown up in the South, and it hadn’t taken DJ long to conclude that he was a Bible Belt kind of guy. Even so, DJ couldn’t get over the idea of a diver actually getting worked up over a little cursing. Although Riggs had grown up in Texas, he now lived with his family in Nevada. He had one of those last names that sounded like a nickname, so that’s what everybody called him.
The combination of Riggs and Harald gave DJ pause. The way he saw it, he was being asked to work a guy who seemed to be waiting for the Second Coming and for another guy who struck him as Napoleon reincarnated. DJ had been asked to be part of a risky, first-of-its-kind journey underground, and this was his team? All he could do was shake his head and mumble, “You guys are a bunch of strange fucking birds.”
But for a guy who loved driving trucks and watching tanks on the History Channel, DJ was beguiled by the setup. The opposite-facing Hummer-brand Humvees were both four-door models, one of them a wagon and the other a pickup. (A second identical pair of Hummers, to be used by the standby crew, had been shipped directly to Deer Island.) Each vehicle required considerable welding to retrofit it for the tunnel job, including the conversion of one of the rear windows into a receptacle for hose hookups. An inflatable Zodiac boat had to be attached to the roof and an outboard motor for the boat attached to the back of the Humvee, in case there was a flood in the tunnel. There were umbilical hoses and manifolds and rebreathers and a two-way trailer. Once the tanks of liquid gas and HP air showed up, they all had to be plumbed into the breathing system. DJ couldn’t get over just how many pieces there were to this colossal puzzle.
As the setup operation continued into the next day, DJ came to appreciate that the Norwesco crew wasn’t one undifferentiated team but rather a group of diverse characters. And he found himself enjoying the company of a couple of them. Tap and Billy had already talked up a guy known as Hoss, who had gone on the factfinding mission with them. And now that DJ had worked with the tall, blond-haired, tobacco-chewing guy from Idaho, he saw what they meant. DJ felt an immediate connection to him when he heard Riggs make the same kind of pointed request to Hoss that he’d made to DJ, asking him not to take the Lord’s name in vain. All right, DJ thought, at least I’m not alone. DJ and Hoss even shared the same first name of Donald—which neither of them ever used much.
DJ also got a good vibe off Hoss’s close friend, a six-foot, 220-pound easygoing guy by the name of Tim Nordeen. After work, they grabbed a few beers and swapped war stories. Tim had thick eyebrows that arched down toward his nose, and a big, honest smile. Although he lived in Washington State, he was originally from Texas. He was no Bible-thumper, though, and cursed almost as much as DJ. They figured out they’d both graduated from the same Houston dive school, though Tim had gone there a full decade earlier. Tim and Hoss were both gun collectors, and they had already made plans to do some gun shopping during their time in New England. For them, no dive job was complete unless they could squeeze in some gun purchases during their downtime. Tim’s wife, Judy Milner, knew he liked guns and that he kept a few of them in their home. But as Hoss explained with a knowing laugh, Judy had no idea just how much Tim liked guns. After one shopping spree, Hoss asked Tim, “How many guns do you have?”
“Between fifty and sixty,” Tim said.
123 (Chapter 6, note 1)
His frustration increased: Although Riggs said he generally doesn’t recall having been offended by profanity other than