The question made DJ chuckle. Here was this big gun-collecting Texan who was worried about being hunted down by cops from the nation’s largest city for the unpardonable sin of having ditched a jalopy on some side street nearly a decade earlier? DJ knew the NYPD was way too busy to be crossing state lines to investigate abandoned-clunker cold cases.
“Nah, Tim,” DJ said comfortingly, “I think you’ll be fine.”
Besides the boredom, there was hunger. During their mine rescue training, the divers had been told that, for obvious reasons, they weren’t supposed to eat while they were wearing their facemasks and breathing supplied air. Harald had explained that there was an extra port on the manifold, which was connected to the HP supply on the roof. Opening the valve to that port186 would fill the Humvee cabin with enough good air to allow the guys inside it to breathe without the use of their facemasks. So DJ and Tim tried that. They rolled up the Hummer windows nice and tight, cracked open the valve, and waited as the cabin filled with air. DJ stared at the gas analyzer as the oxygen level of the ambient air inside the vehicle began to climb. But it seemed to take forever to get the needle to move much, and the noise of the air was so loud that he and Tim worried they might miss a call from the excursion crew or from Harald. Also, they didn’t like the idea of using up a full bottle of their backup air for a temporary upgrade in the comfort level of their dark cabin. So they scrapped the plan and kept their facemasks on.
The other divers’ strategy for dealing with the long stretches without food had been to wolf down their snacks and drinks at the last possible moment before donning their masks. But with a voracious appetite and tall 225-pound frame to feed, DJ eventually decided that wasn’t enough. Sitting in the back seat, he cracked open the bag of peanut butter crackers he had packed into his cooler, along with a bottle of Sprite and a corned beef sandwich. He inhaled deeply before lifting his facemask and popping a couple of crackers into his mouth. Pulling his mask away from his face for a few seconds while sitting inside the Hummer was much less risky than it would have been standing outside it, especially given that partial shot of HP air they’d blown into the cabin. The problem was, DJ tossed the crackers in too quickly and one got lodged in his throat. He started coughing and choking, smacking his hand on the seat to try to force the cracker loose.
Hearing this, Tim turned around in a panic. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?” Because it was so dark, especially in the back seat, it was hard for him to make out exactly what was going on. Yet because Tim was illuminated by the dome lights, DJ could see the look of terror on his face. As DJ worked to dislodge the cracker bit from his throat, he held up the opened package to help Tim understand the source of the problem.
After DJ stopped hacking, Tim was ticked off. “What are you doing eating?” he asked. “You’re not supposed to be doing that.”
“Dude,” DJ said. “I’m always hungry.”
Crouched over, with his hands on his knees as though he were in a huddle from his junior high school football days, Riggs set himself up outside the off-take pipe leading to riser number 1. He began preparing himself, both physically and mentally, to crawl inside and yank out the plug. No one had to remind him that the horizontal pipe was just thirty inches in diameter, any more than he needed to be reminded that he was at the end point of an unventilated, unlit sewer tunnel with an entire ocean sitting above him. He knew most people would sooner sever a finger than subject themselves to this kind of remoteness and confinement, and he could certainly understand that view. After all, he suffered from mild claustrophobia himself.
Riggs could trace that back to a couple of childhood experiences that remained seared in his brain. When he was six, growing up in East Texas, one of his friends had a mattress box in his garage. Another friend had the idea one day to pile into the dark garage and seal one of the boys in their group inside that box. Then all the other boys would move the box around, kicking and punching it, while taking pleasure in the shrieks coming from the boy trapped inside. Riggs could still remember the holy terror he felt at being confined in that box, praying, Please God, let me out of here. What was less than a minute of pure fear had felt like an eternity.
The next unforgettable incident had come courtesy of his siblings. He and his sisters were goofing around and decided to try rolling each other up in a big carpet. When it was his turn inside the rug, he found the experience even worse than his confinement in the mattress box. He was totally restrained, with no hope of coming out until his sisters unrolled him. He had felt like an alligator whose mouth had been sealed shut with duct tape. No matter how strong the alligator might be, once constrained, he was utterly helpless. Rolled up in that rug, Riggs felt his blood curdling and his blood pressure spiking.
Through his many years diving, he had managed to tame, though never quite vanquish, his claustrophobia. He did this by thinking of it as a demon that he needed, through mental effort, to keep locked in a closet. As long as that demon stayed there, it would be as harmless as the alligator with its snout taped shut. On any serious dive job, instead of buckling under the weight of the uncontrollable forces, Riggs focused his mind squarely on the areas where he still had sway. Can I move my eyelids? My fingers? My hands and wrists? Simply being able to check off those items mentally went a long way toward easing his mind, allowing him to keep the demon locked in the closet. For Riggs, there was nothing contrived about the way he got himself into “the zone” before a hazardous assignment. It was how he coped, and coping was how he managed to excel.
He had found less success with other coping mechanisms. He had enlisted in the navy after high school, training in aviation electronics and developing a desire to become a SEAL. But when he thrived as a radar tech, the navy opted to keep him on that track, which effectively closed down his SEAL plans. In 1981 he was a twenty-year-old navy crewman aboard the nuclear-powered USS Nimitz as the world’s largest aircraft carrier crawled sixty miles off the coast of Florida. Just before midnight, a navy187 pilot attempted to land his jet on the flight deck of the Nimitz. At the last minute, the plane veered, colliding with a row of other aircraft lined up on deck. The fiery crash claimed the lives of fourteen crew members, burned by jet fuel or struck by shrapnel. Another forty-eight were injured. Among the casualties were a couple of Riggs’s friends.
Before long, he sought relief from his grief in the bottle. He continued drinking even after he left the navy and began his career as a commercial diver. After nearly a decade, though, he realized the booze was a crutch that was keeping him from real living. He put his trust in sobriety and turned to religion. And all the good in his life—especially his young family—had flowed from that decision.
Outside the connector pipe, Riggs and Billy crouched down near the tunnel floor. Among these off-take pipes that connected to the fifty-five risers, number 1 stood apart. It was the farthest from Deer Island. It shot out of the tunnel’s south side, while the fifty-four others were connected on the north side. It was almost directly across the tunnel from the off-take pipe for riser number 2, while the others were spaced about 125 feet apart. Most important, it was the longest. The diver entering the thirty-inch pipe would have to crawl thirty-five feet to get to the safety plug—double the length of other off-takes. Before Riggs could crawl in, he and Billy needed to pump out the water that had accumulated in the pipe.
186 (Chapter 9, note 9)
Opening the valve to that port: McCauley, “Interview with Grob,” 6.
187 (Chapter 9, note 10)
Just before midnight, a navy: Kurt Andersen, “Night of Flaming Terror,”