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small animals. Most often it will look blue-green. In this weightless transition through worlds, free from narcosis and the storm of dangers at depth, the diver may finally allow himself to become a sightseer on his own adventure.
    At the surface and now near the dive boat’s bow, the diver swims alongside or under the boat to reach a metal ladder unfolded into the water at the stern. He need only climb aboard to end his dive. In calm seas, the process is routine. In rough seas, a steel ladder becomes a wild animal.
    In 2000, a diver named George Place, freshly surfaced from exploring an offshore wreck, reached for the ladder on the dive boat
Eagle’s Nest.
Seas raged and fog charcoaled the horizon. In the boat’s upward heave, a rung from the ladder uppercut Place’s jaw. Stunned and nearly unconscious, he lost his grip. He was cast into the current, disoriented and drifting behind the boat. Dive boats trail a “tag line” from their sterns—attached to a buoy—so that a drifting diver might grab hold and pull himself back. Place couldn’t manage to reach the line. A diver who gets behind the tag line runs a serious risk of going lost. Place got behind the line in a hurry.
    A witness on board ran to alert the captain, Howard Klein. But by the time Klein reached the back of the boat, Place was out of sight; he just wasn’t there anymore. The captain could not simply cut the anchor line and give chase with the
Eagle’s Nest;
he still had other divers decompressing on that line. Instead, he grabbed a two-way radio, rushed into his small Zodiac chase boat, and set out to search for the lost diver. Within seconds, in the increasing violence of the seas, Klein disappeared from view, too. A minute later he radioed to
Eagle’s Nest
that the outboard motor on his Zodiac had failed. He was also adrift and, in the pitching waves, could see the dive boat only when the ocean’s waves crested. By that time, Place’s wife, who was a mate aboard
Eagle’s Nest,
issued a mayday by radio. She reached only a single fishing boat, but it was an hour away. That boat promised to try to raise a closer vessel. After that, no one could do anything but pray that Place was still conscious in the big Atlantic.
    After thirty minutes, Klein coaxed the Zodiac’s motor back to life. But he had drifted too far by that time to have any hope of finding Place. He found his way back to the dive boat. A short time later, a radio call came in to
Eagle’s Nest.
A closer fishing boat had sighted Place—five miles from the dive boat and alive. He had been adrift for more than two hours. Klein, who now had all his divers back on his boat, retrieved Place, sobbing but healthy. After that, divers aboard the
Eagle’s Nest
came to believe in miracles.
    Place had been ten seconds from completing a ninety-minute dive and had ended up cheek-to-cheek with death. It was another example of the truth that defines the sport of deep-wreck diving and shapes the lives of those who love it.
    On a deep-wreck dive, no one is ever truly safe until he is back on the deck of the dive boat.

CHAPTER THREE
    A SHAPE OF POWER

    T HE
S
EEKER
had twenty minutes behind her when the last embers of Jersey Shore nightlife snuffed out under the gray-black horizon. The boat’s external running lights, configured white on the mast, red on the port side, green on the starboard to indicate a “motor vessel under way,” now stood as the only evidence of fourteen men who had decided to take a chance.
    Nagle and Chatterton set the autopilot in the wheelhouse. It would be six hours until the
Seeker
hit the numbers. In the salon below, the paying customers worked themselves out of their clothes and onto the wooden, infirmary-style bunks that lined the outer edges of the compartment. Most had no trouble securing their lucky spot. Each man spread blankets or sleeping bags across his bunk; a passenger did not dare lay naked skin against the gymnasium-issue blue pads that passed for