Excerpt from Pirate Hunters by Robert Kurson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

So, it was clear they needed to call Bowden to thank him for the pirate opportunity, and then to politely decline. Yet, even as they arrived at the Miami airport, neither man could reach for his phone.

In just ten years, John Chatterton had gone from being an underwater construction worker to perhaps the most famous living scuba diver in the world. He hadn't done it by being a great swimmer or by exploring beautiful coral reefs. He did it by going inside the most dangerous and deadly shipwrecks on earth.

These places were steel labyrinths, twisted like balloon animals by nature's temper and the ravages of time. Many lay at depths never intended for humans, where water pressure could collapse vital organs, and the buildup of nitrogen could disorient the mind and turn blood to foam. If a person stayed in the sport for a season, he would see fellow divers hallucinate underwater, get lost inside wrecks, become tangled in wire and cable. If he stayed longer, he would see them succumb to crippling nerve damage, become paralyzed, or drown. And that's if it didn't happen to him first. In his twenty years as a deepwater-wreck diver, Chatterton had seen nine men die, including a father and son, and one of his best friends.

He didn't risk these wrecks for the usual reasons—to stockpile artifacts, bragging rights, or mentions in dive magazines. In fact, he gave away much of the rare china and other relics he found, even when the stuff had great value. He pushed inside these wrecks because he believed, as he had since volunteering to fight on the front lines in Vietnam, that the only way to see what really mattered in life was to go to the places that were hardest to reach. After the war, he found those places to be made of steel and sunk hundreds of feet underwater.

Over the next decade, Chatterton went to dozens of the most dangerous wrecks, often penetrating into places thought too difficult, or deadly, for a human being to reach. By the time he was thirty-five, some veterans of the sport were calling him the greatest shipwreck diver they'd ever seen.

Excerpted from Pirate Hunters by Robert Kurson. Copyright © 2015 by Robert Kurson. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.