Chemistry of Fire Page 6

  The young man at the table kept putting his $25 chips on black one at a time and losing. He sat on a stool, and I stood behind him. I could sense his building frustration: Goddamn it, this has to change, he was thinking. The bleeping thing can’t come up red for bleeping ever. Yet his pile of green chips had dwindled with every turn of the wheel, and I saw his hand move to pick up the last green chip. He hesitated. He held it poised in his fingers over the black, then thought a moment more and set it down on the red. He had given up. I could sense his defeat. I reached over his shoulder and placed my pale purple $500 chip on the black, and his head jerked around to look at me like Who the hell are you? Already I felt I had gotten my $500 worth just for that look. That’s right, I thought. It’s me. Roll over, Rover, the big dog’s here to bury his bone. He didn’t know that I was about to faint from trepidation. He didn’t know that I felt as if I were having a heart attack. But that’s what you pay for, isn’t it?

  The dealer noted the bet and called over to the pit boss, “White outside.” The whole casino went out of focus, and the only sound that was left was the pounding of my heart. I saw the white ball go whirling around as the dealer spun the wheel. I think my eyes must have rolled back in my head for a moment. There was that sudden drop in blood pressure, the pulmonary rush, cardiac crash, as the ball slowed and painted a helical path down to the silver fins of the wheel and bounced twice and leaped into the air before coming to rest inside a black cocoon.

  “Son of a bitch!” the young man said, standing and walking away from the table as the dealer took the man’s last green chip.

  “One white out,” said the dealer, as he gave me another purple chip. I walked away with the two chips clicking together in the palm of my hand. I was shaking so hard I could barely walk. As soon as I was out of sight of the dealer, I sat on a stool by a slot machine and just waited for my heart to stop pounding. Son of a bitch, indeed. You can’t get that rush at the ice cream parlor.

  By chance, I ran into the same young man in the elevator. As we rode up, I felt him looking at me. “How’d you do?” I asked. He already knew how I did.

  “Aw, man,” he said. “I got crushed.”

  “At what?”

  “Blackjack and roulette.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was about even, you know. I’d gone upstairs already. I even had my shoes off, and then I just—”

  “You had a feeling,” he said.

  “Yeah, I had a feeling.”

  “Yeah, I know. You had a feeling. I know. You got all my money.”

  “No guts, no glory,” I said.

  “You had a feeling then?”

  “Yeah. I had a feeling.”

  I went back upstairs and lay in the jacuzzi for the longest time. The whole world was benevolent. Even the honking cars down on the strip seemed to call to me like nightingales. I felt like someone who’d just missed the plane that went down.

  Leaving Caesars the next day, I passed through the Appian Way in order to bid good-bye to the world’s largest human penis, Big Dave, who I felt had given me the fortitude to bet correctly. The Moby Ricardo, enshrined among the whore jewelry and pimp art. And as I drove down the strip toward the airport in my white rental car, I thought: I love Las Vegas.

  A few days after I returned home, Butch called to say that Caesars World stock had been trading at forty-seven dollars on Friday when we arrived. “Over the weekend, while we were polishing the porpoise, ITT bought it at a tender offer of sixty-seven dollars. We were pulling the wrong handle,” he said. “We missed the real game entirely.”

  3

  Stealing Titanic

  WHEREVER WE GO, his stride consumes the landscape. I have to run to keep up with him. Bob Ballard is an imposing man, six foot two, with a flushed complexion and a rugged, windburned face. He has an urgent air about him, as if fleeing an imminent explosion. As we dash out of the chaotic construction site where his new Institute for Exploration is being built up around the Mystic Aquarium near the coast of Connecticut, he leaps into his black Mercedes and grabs for a Coke in the cupholder. It’s only eight in the morning, but he’s on his second or third of the day. He wears the same outfit he wore yesterday: white turtleneck under a navy-blue sweater, khaki slacks, tan socks, and comfortable penny loafers. His shaggy brown hair sticks out from under his blue Institute for Exploration baseball cap. A Mickey Mouse watch adorns his wrist.

  Ballard rockets away and vaults across the bridge over the Thames River at well over eighty miles an hour. He slows to point out the New London Naval Submarine Base, the Coast Guard Academy, and the General Dynamics Electric Boat company, which builds nuclear submarines. Poking out of heavily guarded wharves are colossal black subs, dark symbols of a secret world. “This is a hub of US maritime strength,” he says with the glee of a boy at Disneyland. And for good reason: the navy has been his Disneyland for roughly thirty years. For while Dr. Robert D. Ballard became famous for finding the RMS Titanic on September 1, 1985, his parallel career was that of a Naval Intelligence officer, developing undersea technology and performing top secret Cold War missions on the ocean floor.

  He leans across the leather console, fixes me with his gaze, and shouts, “Cortés! I believe in the method of Cortés, who burned his ships and said to his men, ‘We’re going to Mexico City.’” He jabs me with a broad index finger. “It gets people’s attention. I got my own attention at Woods Hole by announcing that I was leaving five years before the fact. I lame ducked myself. I blew up my life. I needed a new career, and that was how I got it.” (Incidentally, Cortés didn’t burn his boats. He had them dismantled.)

  His cell phone rings. We pull into a parking lot. It’s his wife. The volume is turned up, and I can hear both sides of the conversation. She has planned a special vacation weekend for him, a gift, involving theater, dinner, and a small celebration, and Ballard’s secretary has scheduled his annual trip to Mexico to go dove hunting at the same time. His wife is weeping on the phone. “It’s not my job to monitor your schedule,” she said.

  Ballard is abject, gentle, apologetic. “It’s tragic,” he tells her. “It’s broken, and I’ve got to fix it.”

  I can hear him getting a royal ass chewing. “I don’t want to spend any more time on this,” his second wife, Barbara Earl, born on the Fourth of July to an old Connecticut Yankee family, says through her tears. This man is not one of her people. He is a cowboy, a wanderer from a family of wanderers, whose ancestors were shot down in gunfights out west.

  “Rats,” Ballard says.

  “It’s more than rats!” she screams.

  When he hangs up, he sits for a moment looking deflated. The bluster is gone. His manic motion has taken him into a brick wall. “I haven’t adjusted to the public demands on me,” he says.

  I ask what’s going to happen. “Aside from eating a lot of humble pie . . .” he says. “Her schedule will lose.”

  Until now, the seemingly flawless arc of Ballard’s life has taken him from ROTC in college to the navy and on to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where he discovered the world of manned submersible vehicles. He went on to distinguish himself as a marine geologist, a brilliant visionary, a daring scientist, and one of the foremost deep-sea researchers in the world. He has made 110 expeditions, many of them for the National Geographic Society, including the discovery of the German warship Bismarck in the Atlantic and the USS Yorktown, which was sunk at the Battle of Midway.

  Now fifty-six and galloping through middle age, he has remarried and started a new family. He has stopped traveling to the bottom of the ocean. Instead, he is intent on bringing what he discovered undersea to his mammoth maritime institute. His fame has allowed him to help raise money—$52 million ($37 million of it from the state of Connecticut)—to build a monument to his discoveries. This, he hopes, will be the money machine that will take him further toward his lifelong goal of becoming the preeminent master of deepwater archaeology.

  “Deep submergence has been my life from day one,” he s
ays. After careening through bare suburban landscape, he parks his Mercedes in front of his office in an anonymous strip mall but makes no move to go in. “I can’t even tell you,” he says, “when I first wanted to be an undersea explorer.”

  As a boy, he dreamed of Jules Verne. The son of the chief engineer of the Minuteman missile program, he craved adventure and a place in history. He spent summers on the beach, studying tide pools by day and poring over Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and watching old movies about Titanic at night.

  “What’s it like,” I ask, “being down there?”

  Ballard closes one eye and puts his hand to the other to make a tunnel through which to view the world. “Well, it’s like this,” he says, squinting to peer through. “It’s the most frustrating thing in the world. You can’t see squat.” But those eyes have seen things few of us could imagine.

  When Ballard came of age during the Cold War, America’s nuclear submarines were among the most secretive operations the United States had. Indeed, because submarines—both the Soviet Union’s and ours—were so mobile and difficult to detect and because their nuclear capabilities were frightening, the underwater games subs played became the real cutting edge of cold warfare. During those years, for instance, Soviet satellites could see when the navy sent support ships to work with undersea equipment. Soviet subs could then scramble to the spot to see what was going on. Consequently, any time the navy wanted to do something secret on the surface or below, it was of paramount importance to have other credible reasons for being there. The navy told some whoppers during those years. When the media once questioned why Howard Hughes’s Glomar Explorer was cruising the Pacific, they were told the ship was mining manganese nodules from the seafloor. In fact, it was attempting to raise a Russian nuclear submarine that had sunk.

  Inevitably, then, Ballard’s scientific work took him unavoidably close to the navy netherworld of spying, spooks, and espionage. Beyond that, though, what made him so valuable to the navy was that his geologist’s eye saw new strategic possibilities down under the sea. Ballard taught the navy to view the ocean floor as the battlefield of the future—an inky, liquid camouflage through which entire nuclear fleets could roam. To understand Ballard and how the push and pull between scientific research and military intelligence has shaped his career, you need look no further than his roles in searching for the vessels sunk in three of the most famous marine disasters: Thresher, Scorpion, and Titanic. Though Ballard couldn’t admit it until the information was declassified, he was on the tail end of a secret navy mission when he discovered Titanic.

  “Titanic wasn’t really a cover story,” he says. “It was a traditional relationship between the military and academia.” But people who work with cover stories all their lives say that after a while it becomes difficult to find bedrock truth. Truth and fiction begin to blend.

  USS Thresher, the first of a new generation of sub in Admiral Hyman Rickover’s nuclear fleet, was one of America’s deepest-diving vessels when it sank on April 10, 1963, off the coast of Massachusetts. Thresher was conducting dive trials to its test depth of thirteen hundred feet when, scientists speculate, a pipe burst in the engine room. Seawater, spraying out at more than five hundred pounds per square inch, shorted the electrical system. Orders came staccato as the crewmen, most of them in their twenties, fought for their lives. They dogged hatches and shut valves but faced uncontrolled flooding. When the electrical system shorted, the ship’s nuclear reactor automatically shut itself off as a safety measure. With the nuclear fires out, the steam turbines stopped. With no steam, the propeller stopped, too.

  For a submarine to move through the water, its propeller must turn. The nuclear reactor would take seven minutes to build up enough heat to restart the steam turbines—too much time, it turned out. The initial flurry of activity turned to a deadly hush. Even the air conditioning ceased.

  Commander Wes Harvey ordered, “Full rise on the planes, maximum up angle” in the hope that it might carry the sub to shallower water. He radioed his escort ship, USS Skylark, which was steaming in a circle on the surface. “Experiencing minor difficulties,” he called. “Have positive up angle. Am attempting to blow.”

  But efforts to blow the ballast failed.

  Thresher spent the last of her momentum and began to sink backward. Harvey next reported to Skylark, “Exceeding test depth.” His transmission could barely be heard.

  A submarine can dive only so deep before its hull collapses from the weight of the water above it. Each crewman must have known that Thresher’s crush depth was fifteen hundred feet. As engineers watched the temperature gauges, hoping they’d get steam before the hull imploded, the rest of the crew was left with nothing to do but watch the walls and listen to the ship groan and creak.

  The officers on board Skylark heard a dark, liquid explosion that must have cut them to the heart. Then they heard a second detonation that made an entirely different sound, crisp and dry and violent, like dynamite, detectable several thousand miles away by undersea hydrophones.

  Death came quickly for the 129 seamen. At 750 pounds per square inch, a stream of water can cut steel. The submarine imploded and then quickly exploded, shredding the hull to scrap and flinging it into bits to the dark sea currents.

  In 1963, John P. Craven was chief scientist for the Polaris ballistic missile program. Eccentric and mysterious, Craven was regarded as kind of a Dr. Strangelove, operating on behalf of the military establishment from within the shadows of black security. But in the realm of diving technology, Craven’s work set the bar—and the stage—for what Ballard would later achieve.

  After Thresher sank, there was a public outcry. The families demanded that something be done. Craven was put in charge of developing a technology to locate and save sunken subs. He soon found money pouring into his budget to develop a deep-submergence rescue vehicle (DSRV). It was what Hollywood would have done with the story. The problem was, as Craven put it: “The probability that we might actually rescue someone was vanishingly small. DSRV was good cover because there’s a mystique about rescue. But DSRV could never be used. We built it because it would give us tremendous capabilities to do other things. It was always tacit in these highly classified areas. Nobody said, ‘We want you to give it capabilities other than rescue.’ Yet we decided to give the DSRV the capability to lock divers in and out at great depths and decompress them slowly.”

  Eight years later, a submarine called the USS Halibut would leave for the Sea of Okhotsk off of Siberia with what the navy told the media was a DSRV attached to her decks. In fact, the device, shaped like a fifty-foot-long cigar, was a saturation diving chamber. Developed in secret, it allowed divers to work at previously unreachable depths. Upon reaching the target, divers emerged from the decompression chamber to tap into a Soviet communications cable. It was one of the navy’s major coups of the Cold War. On its way home, Halibut stopped at a Soviet missile test range, where its divers retrieved enough fragments to allow engineers back home to assemble a nearly complete Soviet missile. Yet not even the best submersible could reach Thresher where she lay at a depth of eighty-four hundred feet. She remained there for the next twenty-one years.

  On May 22, 1968, a second nuclear submarine, USS Scorpion, vanished on its way home to Virginia with ninety-nine souls on board. Soviet subs had been in the area, and navy brass immediately wondered if the Russians had sunk Scorpion—if, in short, we were going to war. To make matters worse, Scorpion was carrying two live Mark 45 ASTOR torpedoes fitted with nuclear warheads. (The best guess to this day is that a defective battery set off one of the conventional torpedoes, blowing the hatches and causing the sub to sink.)

  Craven was put in charge of finding Scorpion, and on October 29, 1968, he did so, south of the Azores. Finding her was one thing, but Scorpion lay in 11,500 feet of water, beyond the reach of any of his submersibles.

  Ballard was assigned to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts when Scorpion sank. Rushing about
in his white uniform, Ballard seemed to be moving in a dozen directions at once—military man, geologist, would-be explorer, dreamer, and consummate salesman. They called him the White Tornado.

  But Ballard’s true motivation, his dream, was to dive where no one else had gone before. The perfect vehicle for that, Alvin, a twenty-three-foot, three-man submersible, was docked at Woods Hole. Craven had once used Alvin to locate a hydrogen bomb that the air force had accidentally dropped into the Mediterranean. Ballard spotted the white sphere of the submersible on his first day at Woods Hole and desperately wanted to take her for a spin. But even the senior scientists at Woods Hole would have had about as much chance of diving in Alvin as they had of going into orbit. Ballard knew that if he was to be taken seriously, he needed a PhD. By chance, a subject called plate tectonics was set to explode within the field of geophysics. Here was a dream come true: undersea exploration, adventure, and a doctoral thesis he could research in person on the ocean floor in a brand-new field of study.

  Ballard also had an ace in his pocket. Woods Hole was supported largely by the navy. The young ensign happened to be the new liaison between the two: Woods Hole’s funding went through Ballard.

  Within four years, Ballard had found his way aboard Alvin.

  At about the time Scorpion sank, though, Alvin was being lowered into the water when its lines broke. The crew barely escaped drowning. As they scrambled to safety, the world’s most capable submersible sank in fifty-two hundred feet of water.

  Alvin was ultimately retrieved in the summer of 1969, but she would need a complete refitting, and with the war in Vietnam raging, money was tight. Ballard’s boss mused wistfully that what they needed was another lost hydrogen bomb to justify filling the coffers. Ballard shot back, “What we really need is for Alvin to go out and find Titanic.” Ballard the salesman had an instinctive grasp of the romance and myth of the sea, and the story of Titanic was the ultimate seafarer’s yarn. He knew even then that finding her could open doors in ways that not even the navy had considered.