Still, few people notice the casualties when they come, as they typically do, in increments of one or two. That’s almost always the pattern in the world of commercial divers, a fraternity of just a couple thousand full-time construction workers who happen to do their building and welding underwater. At the time of the Deer Island mission, a fresh government analysis zeroing in on diver fatalities garnered little public attention even as its findings rippled through the fraternity. The report from the Centers for Disease Control6 found that commercial divers were killed on the job at a rate forty times higher than that of the average worker.
The Deer Island tunnel was twenty-four feet in diameter but became progressively narrower along its final stretch. DJ took comfort in the fact that at least the divers wouldn’t have to walk the entire nine and a half miles. Instead, they would travel in two souped-up Hummer Humvees. They needed two because deep inside the tunnel there wouldn’t be enough room to turn a vehicle around. So they used a two-way trailer to tow a second Humvee facing in the opposite direction, which they would use for the return trip. DJ liked the military-special-ops feel to the mission, even if the unorthodox breathing system at the center of it made him nervous.
Over by the Humvees, he found the other two divers who would round out their team. Tim Nordeen was a husky guy who had recently shaved down his bushy beard into a goatee so it wouldn’t interfere with the seal on his facemask. At thirty-nine, Tim was the oldest guy on the crew and had the air of someone who’d experienced enough in life to know not to sweat its little stresses.
Standing on the bumper of one of the Humvees was foreman Billy Juse, who happened to be DJ’s close friend and the only member of the team he knew well. Billy had a slim, five-foot-nine frame and a dark mustache with edges as squared off as tape cut with scissors. DJ loved to tease Billy about that thick, dense landing strip under his nose. “Hey, Billy,” he would say. “I forgot to bring my lunch today. You mind if I clean off your mustache when you’re done eating? I’m sure I can find enough left over in there to make a sandwich.”
The team would drive the Humvees as far into the tunnel as they could go. At that point, two divers would camp out while the other three trudged on foot to the very end of the tunnel. The assignment called for DJ and Tim to remain in the Humvee. But before the journey began, Billy pulled his buddy aside. He said his back was hurting and asked DJ to switch places with him.
“You’re a pussy,” DJ said.
“Maybe so,” Billy shot back, “but I’m your boss.”
That was only partially true, and they shared a knowing laugh. They both usually answered to Tap, but it had already become painfully clear that on this job, even Tap wasn’t in charge.
After a slow, two-hour drive, the lead Humvee reached the nine-and-a-quarter-mile mark, beyond which it could go no farther. Billy and Tim remained planted inside the vehicle, monitoring the breathing system for all five divers, while DJ, Riggs, and Hoss began their trek on foot.
The three guys remained connected, through about fifteen hundred feet of hose, to the air system back in the Humvee. The hose was called an umbilical because a diver could not survive without it any longer than a baby in the womb could survive without hers.
It took DJ, Riggs, and Hoss twenty minutes to trudge, with their gear, about eleven hundred feet. Hoss positioned himself outside the final stretch of the tunnel, just before its width shrank to five feet. His job was to watch over their connections to the main breathing system and use a communications wire to call in periodic updates to Tim back in the Humvee.
DJ and Riggs slogged onward, duck-walking several hundred feet more to the tunnel’s end. Once there, Riggs took on the toughest assignment, shimmying deep into a slimy, skinny connector pipe to remove a heavy safety plug. With DJ’s help, he would need to repeat that task in a series of pipes. To most people, the claustrophobia inside that cramped, black space so far from civilization would be paralyzing. The pipe Riggs had to crawl through measured just thirty inches across—not much wider than his shoulders. And he had to be careful not to jostle the cumbersome breathing gear that was keeping him alive.
Not long after Riggs7 emerged from the pipe, Hoss noticed that the divers’ umbilicals had become dangerously tangled. He instructed DJ and Riggs to get their hoses straightened out before doing anything else.
As Hoss began his own untangling effort, he looked up to see something startling. DJ was collapsing onto the tunnel floor, in a strange kind of involuntary slow motion.
“Are you okay, DJ?” Hoss yelled, muffled, through his facemask.
Before he could finish his sentence, Riggs went down next, falling on one knee in front of DJ.
Hoss suddenly felt light-headed himself, in a warm and fuzzy way, as though he had just tossed back a few cocktails. He had enough presence of mind to know that warm and fuzzy was not how you wanted to be feeling when you were buried under the sea, miles from land. “I need to call Tim,” he said.
When he reached Tim on the comm wire, Hoss pressed him for what the oxygen content was in their main breathing supply. Anything below 19 percent meant trouble. Tim said he and Billy would check. A few seconds later Tim called back. “Shit, it’s 8.9!” he shouted, frantically.
Then the line went dead.
1. DJ
DJ pulled into the driveway, got out of his Ford Bronco, and stepped into what felt like a 1980s music video. Straight ahead was a suntanned brunette washing her car while wearing ripped jean shorts and a wet half-shirt. As he trained his eyes on her, DJ could practically hear the thumping hair-metal-band soundtrack playing in his head. Actually, it wasn’t all in his head. There was music coming from around the back of the house, where someone had placed a speaker facing out of a first-floor window.
At a picnic table, three attractive women in their early twenties sat in Daisy Duke cutoffs and tight tops, drinking wine coolers and taking in the sun on a late summer afternoon. It was a Friday in August 1993, and DJ, a month shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, had just returned to Massachusetts after more than two years working as an offshore diver in the Gulf of Mexico. During his time away, his mother and younger brother had moved into the upstairs apartment of this two-family house in Waltham, a former mill city west of Boston. They were away on vacation now, so DJ was on his own as he saw the new place for the first time.
A guy around his age approached him, explaining that he lived in the downstairs apartment with his girlfriend, the dark-haired car washer. He invited DJ to grab a beer and join the party that was just getting started. DJ didn’t need much convincing and plopped himself down at the picnic table. Given his muscular build, broad smile, and easy conversational skills, he never had much trouble getting noticed by girls, even if he was shier than he let on.
A blonde named Lisa, in between drags on her cigarette, began chatting him up. She had a big laugh to match a big personality. When she told a story, she used her chin, not just her hands, for emphasis. DJ immediately liked her. But his eyes were more drawn to the black-haired woman sitting next to her, who introduced herself as Donna. At least that’s what it sounded like to DJ’s ears. But when he called her that a few minutes later, she quickly corrected him. It may have sounded like Donna, but her name was actually spelled Dana. To nail the correct pronunciation—DAH-nah—you needed to contort your mouth into a horizontal line as exaggerated as a mailbox slot. Seems like a lot of trouble for a name, DJ thought to himself. But he was so smitten that he didn’t mind. Dana had bronze skin, big alluring eyes, and milky teeth that lit up her face when she smiled.
6 (Prologue, note 6)
The report from the Centers for Disease Controclass="underline" Division of Safety Research, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, CDC, “Deaths Associated with Occupational Diving—Alaska 1990-1997,”
7 (Prologue, note 7)
Not long after Riggs: Details are drawn from contemporaneous accident notes written by Donald “Hoss” Hosford and Dave Riggs as well as from diver interviews by the author.