“How many does Judy think you got?”
“Probably four or five.”
Tim was a conservative Republican, blue-collar gun lover, while Judy was a liberal Democrat, a child psychiatrist, and a gun-control advocate. So he’d found ways to hide his pieces in various corners of their house, including a false box spring in the guest room, all so he could keep up his hobby without causing the woman he loved any grief. DJ thought to himself, Now, these are guys I can get along with.
Hoss placed a work boot at the mouth of the pipe that lay on the grass in Tap’s yard, then stepped back to snap a photo. It wasn’t uncommon for divers to do what Hoss was doing: take pictures to fill photo albums from each of their assignments. The fiberglass pipe was about twenty feet long and attached to a ninety-degree concrete elbow, which housed one of the much-talked-about safety plugs. The idea behind bringing this mock-up to Tap’s yard was to give the divers practice shimmying into the pipe, detaching the plug with a special wrench, then shimmying back out with the plug—all without disturbing their breathing hoses. The guys had heard the pipes they’d be crawling through would be just thirty inches wide. But there was nothing like seeing how a man’s work boot partially blocked the mouth of the pipe to hammer home just how narrow their passageway would be.
Although he’d never served in the military, Hoss carried himself like someone in the Special Forces: strong and fast, cocky and quick-witted. He guessed that the camaraderie he found with the other guys in the overwhelmingly male world of diving was similar to what a soldier might find in a foxhole. After all, a diver, like a soldier, relied on his comrades to keep him alive. He had to be able to trust that the guy at the other end of his hose knew what he was doing. If there was a lazy screwup in their midst, divers were never shy about calling him out before his incompetence cost a life. Also like soldiers, divers spent so much time together, and away from their families, that tight bonds inevitably formed. The bonding was usually expressed in the macho language of ball busting—Hoss’s buddies mocked him for being a supposedly tough guy who fastidiously ironed every last wrinkle out of his shirts—but it was intimate just the same.
Sometimes Hoss wondered how he’d managed to stick with diving, given his early experiences. When he was a sixteen-year-old growing up in the northern Idaho lakefront resort town of Coeur d’Alene, he’d decided to get certified in scuba. During one of his first lessons, as he was preparing to take the regulator from his trainer, he accidentally exhaled all his air, then sucked in a bunch of water. In a panic, he foolishly raced to the surface, which, if he’d been much deeper, would have surely given him the bends. He made it there unharmed but shaken by the knowledge of how close he had come to injury. After dive school in Seattle, he headed to the Gulf of Mexico to work offshore. On his second day there, he saw a fellow worker fall nearly two hundred feet, from a drill tower to the deck. As a helicopter whisked the guy away, Hoss asked himself, What the hell am I getting myself into?
Because work in the Gulf was slow at the time, he was thrilled when he got a call from Roger Rouleau offering him an entry-level tender position with Norwesco. That dive company’s office in Spokane was an easy drive from his home over the Idaho border, meaning Hoss could remain near his girlfriend, Heather, a hairstylist he’d begun dating right out of high school. At Norwesco, the older divers seemed to respect Hoss for being a quick study and eager to learn.
In the five years since he joined Roger’s company, Hoss had come to be seen as a rising star. The twenty-four-year-old, who had recently married Heather, had just finished working on the Lake Mead project. Although that had been largely a positive experience for him, he’d seen what had happened the one time he had complained to a Norwesco supervisor124 about a safety concern: He’d been quickly moved to another part of the project. Hoss figured the fastest way to jeopardize his rising-star status would be to squawk too much.
After Roger offered him a spot on the Deer Island team, Hoss consulted one of his most experienced diver friends, who raised doubts based on what he’d heard of Harald’s plan. This mentor suggested he take a pass. Hoss valued his advice, but he knew that, unlike his mentor, he didn’t have more than two decades in the business, so he couldn’t afford to pick and choose assignments. He was a young guy with a young wife who’d just bought a beautiful piece of land in Coeur d’Alene on which they planned to build their dream house. He needed to keep his climb at the company going and take good opportunities where they came.
For Hoss, a big selling point of the tunnel job was that one of his closest friends from Norwesco had already signed on. The fact that Tim, who had fifteen years on Hoss in both diving and in life, was comfortable with the mission said a lot. The two friends made for an unlikely pair. With his spiky blond hair and clean-shaven face, Hoss was lean and impatient. With gray threaded through his brown hair and bushy beard, Tim was burly and laid-back.
Tim’s calm approach to life had served him well, even during the occasional crisis. On a salvage dive years earlier125, Tim had been serving as tender to one of his buddies, when the guy relayed a panicked message on his comm wire. His umbilical had become dangerously entwined with some ship lines, to the point where he feared he wouldn’t make it. Without hesitation or drama, Tim put on his dive hat and went down to rescue his friend. The umbilical had become so ensnared with old ropes that Tim had had to methodically untangle them, one by one, all while his buddy’s panic level continued to rise. Somehow Tim managed to keep his nerves in check.
About the only time that Tim had found himself agitated was during his four-year stint living with Judy in New York City. They had met at a party when he was working in Galveston, Texas, and she was doing her residency there. When she earned a prestigious fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at Columbia University’s medical school, they moved into an apartment in an upscale New York coop building. Because he refused to depart from his usual uniform of overalls and work boots, Tim was occasionally mistaken for a handyman by his fellow co-op residents. He found relief from his fish-out-of-water discomfort by taking dive jobs that kept him away for long stretches. He once joined a team hunting for sunken treasure off the Florida Keys. They never found it, but he did come away with a great barstool story about how a rival treasure-hunting team had shot at his gang. An unhurried outdoorsman, Tim viewed Manhattan as a penitentiary, with its blocks darkened by skyscrapers and clogged with tightly wound, overdressed people trampling each other as they raced to their next appointment.
Their next move, to Snohomish in rural Washington, had been a compromise. Judy was happy that the bustle of Seattle was only an hour away. Tim was thrilled that their five-acre property was so secluded that it could have been its own nature preserve. He had painstakingly built a wooden walkway that wound its way for five hundred feet over the wetlands in their backyard. He also devised an elaborate series of pulleys to feed the birds, and he regularly hand-fed a mother raccoon and her babies. He built a small wooden coffin for one of his cats when she died, holding a graveside memorial service that the neighborhood dogs sat through silently in the rain. To Tim, animals were creatures that deserved loving care. That was also why, as much as he loved guns, he had little interest in hunting. Judy would often remind him of how he had won her heart during one of their first dates, at the beach, when she watched him pick up his vulnerable puppy and tenderly carry it to safety away from the waves. Tim had found that brown and white mutt a few years earlier as a stray and named her Shackles, the term for the horseshoe-shaped metal fasteners that divers use in underwater rigging. When he and Judy moved to New York, Tim had left Shackles in his parents’ care in Texas. Just a few months before Tim left for Deer Island, his folks had broken the news to him that Shackles had died, at the age of fifteen.
124 (Chapter 6, note 2)
the one time he had complained to a Norwesco supervisor: Hoss, interviews by author, 2009 and 2010.
125 (Chapter 6, note 3)
On a salvage dive years earlier: Judy Milner, interview by author, September 2010; Bob and Shirley Nordeen, interview by author, 2010.