The night before, capping several days of searching, a remote-operated vehicle from the navy’s USS Grasp had located the fuselage from Kennedy’s plane, 110 feet below the surface of the water off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard206. That morning, as the Norwesco and Black Dog divers were at work in the Deer Island tunnel, a team of their diving counterparts from the U.S. Navy and the state police began searching the plane-wreckage area, looking for the bodies of JFK Jr. and his wife and sister-in-law.
Shortly before the noon newscast began, the dive team located the bodies. Senator Ted Kennedy, the family patriarch, boarded the USS Grasp to be briefed on recovery operations. Then, during Tap’s live interview, he was asked for his insights on what the divers might have faced in trying to locate the bodies and how they would go about recovering them. Sitting on the rocks, looking out at the harbor as the warm sun beat down on him, Tap fielded the questions with ease.
At quarter past noon, with the water pumped out of the pipe to riser number 3, Riggs began his crawl in207. He followed the same steps he had the day before in getting himself and all his tools into the slimy, pitch-black, constricted horizontal pipe. Once he removed the bolts208 from the safety plug, he opened its release valve. Then he yelled for DJ to pump up the hose leading to his hydraulic tool, which he used to release the circlip. After he dislodged the oversize-salad-bowl plug, he began backing out of the pipe, dragging the plug with him as he pushed the circlip out with his feet. The whole process209 to remove plug number 3 took about twenty minutes—considerably faster than yesterday—giving Riggs confidence they would be able to get a lot more done during this shift.
Once Riggs was out of the pipe, crouched over, DJ told him to take a break. As much as he was determined to keep the pace of the day’s mission brisk, Riggs remembered Harald’s most recent instructions, for the guys to take turns doing their heavy work. So he took a breather210, watching as DJ dragged plug number 3 over to Hoss and the boat 125 feet away. After a couple of minutes, Riggs headed toward them with his umbilical dragging behind him. He joined Hoss at the boat, which now was almost completely full, given the three giant plugs that were sharing space inside it with all the other gear. Along the walk, Riggs passed DJ, going in the other direction, video camera in hand.
With DJ heading into the pipe to document the removal of plug number 3, Riggs headed toward number 4 with the hydraulic tool to begin pumping out the water left in the pipe.
“Hey, Riggs,” Hoss said. “We should wait till DJ videos number 3 before we pull number 4211.”
Riggs nodded. “I’ll just go in and get started on the bolts.”
As Hoss called in a status update to Tim around 12:40 p.m., Riggs began making his way into pipe number 4. When he reached that plug, he realized there was something different about it. Unlike the other salad bowls, this one had not one but two ball valves at the center of it. And that second valve blocked off access to the circlip. Riggs tried moving it, but it was rusted in place. There was no way he was going to be able to get that plug out.
Then a work-around dawned on him. He crawled out of the pipe and headed straight for the boat. There he grabbed the Sawzall. If there would be no getting around the valve, he would go through it.
The valve would not go down without a fight. After Riggs had cut halfway into it, he noticed that he had burned out the blade of the saw. All its teeth were gone. So he maneuvered his way out of the pipe yet again. With Hoss standing beside him, Riggs leaned into the boat to search for a new blade. Meanwhile, DJ had finished videotaping and was now walking toward them.
With the blade in hand, Riggs began to head back into the pipe, but Hoss called him off. Riggs and DJ had spent the last couple of hours walking back and forth, back and forth, inside the cramped final section of the tunnel, working strenuously as they lugged around plugs and pumps and sandbags. In the process, they had turned their personal three-hundred-foot-long umbilicals into six hundred feet of tangled mess, like a big batch of angel hair pasta left on the stove overnight. “Let’s take a few minutes and straighten these hoses out,” Hoss said.
Riggs agreed. Even though Hoss was more than a decade his junior, and even though he was serving as foreman only because he was filling in for Mars, Riggs knew the guy was smart and capable. Besides, as much as Riggs wanted to keep the momentum going, Hoss’s suggestion to take some time and straighten things out made a lot of sense.
To disentangle their hoses, DJ walked back into the five-foot-diameter section, heading toward the very end of the tunnel. At the same time, Riggs walked several paces behind him, coiling up the hose that trailed behind DJ like some sort of oversize kite string. After several minutes of this, Riggs found himself feeling weird. is a simple task, he told himself, and confused. He looked to the tunnel wall, checking for spots. If he saw them, he’d know he was about to black out. But he didn’t see any spots. So he kept walking, kept coiling. Then, without any warning, DJ just stopped walking212. Riggs caught up to him so quickly that he nearly bumped into him, as if they were in a Keystone Kops skit. Suddenly Riggs could sense his hearing start to change, as if somebody had placed cones over his ears. His vision grew blurry. He wondered: Is this what people mean when they talk about tunnel vision?
He looked over to see DJ helplessly slide down onto the tunnel floor. As he heard Hoss yell, Riggs felt powerless to stop from falling down himself. He landed on one knee, settling on the tunnel floor across from DJ. “Hoss,” Riggs called out, not quite sure where he was or if anyone was hearing him. “What’s going on with the gas?”
Hoss had never been in such a strange situation in his life. Here he was, nearly ten miles into a dead-end tunnel under the sea, and he’d just seen the two other guys on his crew collapse. And yet in some ways, he’d never felt so good in his life. What he was seeing was danger and doom in the darkness around him. What he was feeling was freedom and lightness, as if he were being transported to a beautiful place. He had moved past the frustration stage he had felt two days earlier, when his facemask had sucked to his face, and he seemed to be moving briskly through fogginess, headed for euphoria. Somewhere at the base of this purple haze, he sensed that he had to fight it.
“I need to call Tim,” he muttered.
Hoss reached Tim213 on the comm wire and told him he needed to know what the oxygen level was in their breathing supply. Tim assured him that he and Billy would check. A few seconds later, Tim called back. “Shit, it’s 8.9!” he shouted.
“8.9!” Hoss repeated, alarmed even though his comforting narcoticlike haze had yet to lift.
When the line went dead, Hoss lunged toward the manifold in the boat and flicked the lever. That switched off the mixed gas that was flowing into their umbilicals and facemasks from the MAP Mix 9000 back in the Humvee, replacing it with air coming directly from the emergency HP cylinder they’d brought with them on the boat. The source of air for the breathing system supplying all five divers could also be changed, from the mixed-gas supply to the HP bottles on the roof of the Humvee. But making that change involved turning a couple of valves back at the Hummer. Hoss had changed the source solely for his three-man team.
206 (Chapter 10, note 16)
off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard: On the contemporaneous media accounts of the JFK Jr. recovery, see “The Life of JFK Jr.: Special Report: Coverage of the JFK Jr. Tragedy,”
211 (Chapter 10, note 21)
“before we pull number 4”: Hoss accident notes, 2; Riggs accident notes, 7.
212 (Chapter 10, note 22)
DJ just stopped walking: Riggs accident notes, 8; Hoss accident notes, 3.
213 (Chapter 10, note 23)
Hoss reached Tim: Hoss accident notes, 3. In his accident notes, Hoss writes that Tim said, “Shit, it’s 8.9%.” Although he acknowledges in his notes that Tim may have reported 9.8%, Hoss writes, “I think 8.9%.”