Chemistry of Fire Read online

  Scientists at Woods Hole had wanted to refit Alvin with an expensive titanium pressure sphere. When the navy provided it, Ballard calculated that Alvin could dive to twelve thousand feet, where Scorpion—and Titanic—lay.

  Ballard dove Alvin in the Gulf of Maine. Taking samples and measurements there, he completed his PhD (funded by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency) and contributed to the theory of plate tectonics. He also extended to the ocean depths the range of geologists, who had previously been confined to taking samples on land.

  On the strength of this work, he was invited to join the largest oceanographic expedition ever undertaken, the French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study (FAMOUS) in 1973 and 1974. In later dives, Ballard helped discover previously unknown chimneys that led from the earth’s molten core into the icy ocean waters—the smokestacks on the roof of the factory that creates our world. In the process, he helped prove the value of manned submersibles in real science. And the team he was on made the first real advance in discovering the origins of life on earth.

  By 1976 Ballard would dive on board Alvin to its full test depth of twelve thousand feet in the Cayman Trough, which he calls “one of the most spectacular submerged terrains on the planet.” No sunlight filtered down to that depth. The seawater was as black as outer space. The pressure was fifty-five hundred pounds per square inch, 7.3 times that which had collapsed Thresher like a paper cup. Ballard said that looking at the shiny titanium hex nuts on the inside of Alvin’s hull was “like gazing into the maw of a loaded cannon.” Every time the hull came in contact with rock, his mouth went dry. He was riding in a toy balloon, blown up to its absolute limit, that was being dragged and bounced along a jagged reef. If anything had gone wrong, no one would ever have known what had happened. They’d have hauled up nothing but a broken cable.

  That was Ballard’s life for ten years. The child who’d read Jules Verne had become him. But just as astronauts who’d been to the moon must have seen that they weren’t going back, Ballard could see the era of manned undersea exploration coming to an end. And that’s when he began to demolish his life.

  On one of his early dives, Ballard had invited a marine biologist along to classify some of the life-forms he had found in the mineral-rich environment of hydrothermal vents—marine life that no human eye had ever seen.

  “Imagine this,” Ballard says. “You’re the first biologist ever to see these new life-forms. You’d die to go down there, right?” But when they reached the bottom, the biologist turned his back to the window and watched the television screen. “What the hell were we doing down there?”

  Ballard realized that his dream to journey endlessly on the ocean floor was essentially a doomed effort. When the quality of the TV picture became good enough, people would no longer bother going. It was too expensive, too dangerous, and machines would do it better. So Ballard decided he might as well be the one to make that happen.

  In 1979, while on sabbatical from the navy at Stanford, Ballard had heard about fiber optics. He saw how this could be used on a tethered vehicle that would give realistic images of the ocean floor in real time. He began sketching designs for a new system. Argo would be a larger vehicle tethered to a surface ship. Inside the unmanned Argo would be a smaller robot, Jason, that could snake out and gather images in tight spaces—Titanic’s staterooms, for example, or Scorpion’s torpedo room.

  Such an idea could not have come at a more propitious time. Yuri Andropov, the former chairman of the KGB, had just become the new leader of the Soviet Union. President Reagan had hired a hard-liner named John Lehman as secretary of the navy. Reagan was publicly calling the Soviet Union the “evil empire,” while nuclear submarines played dangerous games of chicken beneath the sea. Nuclear war seemed closer than ever.

  “Most people look at a Mercator projection and say, ‘Wow, it’s a long way from the Soviet Union to the US,’” Ballard says. “But if you look at a globe, you can see that from the Arctic Ocean, it’s just a little lob.” Ballard makes a popping sound with his mouth and an arc with his hand.

  As submarine technology in America grew superior to that of the Soviets, the Russian fleet retreated. Instead of chasing around the American coastline, their subs chose to remain submerged in the Arctic Ocean for months at a time. They had the capability to burst through the ice and fire nuclear missiles “right over Canada,” as Ballard explained. The complexion of the Cold War had changed.

  By the summer of 1982, that atmosphere of uncertainty allowed Ballard to come up with the idea he’d been looking for, the seafarer’s dream that would pave the road to Titanic. Ballard went before the navy’s International Seapower Symposium at the Naval War College and talked of a new concept that he called terrain warfare. Submariners had traditionally viewed terrain as something to be avoided: you run into it, you’re dead. But Ballard wanted to use terrain the way tanks do on land. You could hide the entire US Navy in one of those undersea mountain ranges, he said. The audience was riveted. When an impressed Secretary Lehman approached him afterward, Ballard pounced with his idea for deepwater imaging.

  It took less than a month for the Office of Naval Research to sponsor Argo/Jason. The money streamed in, allowing Ballard to establish the Woods Hole Deep Submergence Laboratory.

  Deep in the Connecticut woods one day, slaloming along two-lane blacktop in the black Mercedes, Ballard suddenly slams on the brakes and points to a narrow stream cutting through a yellow canebrake. “Look at that,” he says. “Isn’t that beautiful?” He watches the middle distance, seemingly at peace, as if he has escaped for a moment into the landscape. Then he stomps the accelerator, and we flee past the stream and dive once more into the forest at a speed that makes the landscape seem to revolve around us.

  “Look, I’m a terrain person. I’m a geologist,” Ballard explains. “I came into the navy having no idea that it was three separate worlds: surface, air, and submarines. I wanted to talk to these guys, but if you didn’t have dolphins on”—he reaches over, grabs my lapel, and peeks under it, checking to see if I wear the insignia of the navy submarine forces—“the hell with you!”

  And yet Ballard had a real advantage. He knew more about the deep ocean than the navy did. Submariners believe that they rule beneath the waves, but compared to Ballard, they’d only been skimming the surface. He was invited into the Pentagon’s E Ring, where the navy’s most senior officers worked, and was shocked to see the simple crudity of the charts on the walls. How little they knew of the submerged mountain ranges that were his workplace. In fact, the navy owned proper bathymetric charts, but no one seemed to grasp their strategic significance. They were locked away in a vault in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

  Ballard flew to Bay St. Louis and had a three-dimensional model built from them. Then he took the model to Vice Admiral Ronald Thunman.

  “Thunman was Op-Two,” Ballard says with a sort of roaring, whispered, wide-eyed reverence. It’s spook talk. “Do you understand? Oh two. He lived in a cell. This man was God!” Ballard was realizing how the game was played. Most of the world is underwater at an average depth of twelve thousand feet. If you’re the world’s top superpower, that’s an important fact. The Cold War was being fought underwater, and these were the guys running it. And yet Ballard understood what not even Thunman understood: that the low ground is the high ground. And they didn’t even have the right maps on their walls.

  The vice admiral took one look at Ballard’s model of the undersea terrain, and the lightbulb went on in his head. He gave Ballard NR-1, a miniature, ten-man navy nuclear submersible, designed by Admiral Hyman Rickover—and Craven. “The NR-1 isn’t a very good spy sub—Rickover just wanted the smallest nuclear reactor in the world,” Ballard says. “So I took NR-1 up to the Reykjanes Ridge and showed [Thunman] that we could live in that terrain, too. Reykjanes Ridge includes Iceland.”

  When I first met Ballard, he invited me into his tiny office, and we sat knee to knee because there was nowhere else to go. He said, �
��Why should I talk to you? You can’t make me more famous.” I went home a bit disappointed. When I told my editor at National Geographic what had happened, he called headquarters in Washington. National Geographic was founded by navy spooks. Soon I received a call from Ballard’s office inviting me to come back. Now he seems at pains to impress me with his résumé.

  “I was evolving a whole new strategy!” Ballard proclaims. “I’m a commander in the navy! You just ask Thunman or Lehman what they think of Bob Ballard’s role in the navy. Call them and ask them. They’ll tell you.”

  Yet Ballard laughs at my suggestion that he might be involved in the kind of spying that Craven did. “I got MIT started on designing terrain-involved warfare, not picking up junk off the ocean floor and certainly not tapping phones,” he says.

  By the time he started working with Thunman, Ballard was indeed a known quantity in the world of undersea science. His support ships from Woods Hole were a common sight out on the Atlantic. Stories about his scientific expeditions were published in National Geographic, which provided additional funding. That work was a perfect cover story—though a true one—for his other assignment: in the winter of 1984, the navy gave Ballard the go-ahead to test his new equipment by performing the first survey of the sunken nuclear submarine Thresher.

  From its first passes over the remains of Thresher in July 1984, Argo delivered images just as vivid as Ballard had hoped they would be: a crew member’s black rubber boot, a rubber glove knotted in the shape of a fist. Safe within their control van, a sort of mobile home full of electronic equipment mounted on the deck of a research vessel called Knorr, Ballard’s crew looked on with reverential astonishment. They understood that they were visiting the naked graveyard of 129 men. A human hand had made that fist, a young submariner drifting through crush depth listening to the creaking hull. A last moment of resolve had closed his hand before a scalpel of ice water took his life.

  Ballard shivers, remembering. “Those are my brothers who died here,” he says in a quiet voice. “I knew I could be looking at myself.”

  The team watched the array of images as the Argo moved back and forth in a pattern known as “mowing the lawn.” When Thresher imploded, dozens of steel gas bottles were released. Being heavy, they had streamlined directly to the bottom like bombs.

  “They were about six feet tall,” says Ralph Hollis, Ballard’s pilot. “As we drove over them, it was like rows of tombstones.”

  A shipwreck in shallow water will form a field of debris a few hundred yards around at most. Yet as the lines on the chart table filled with paper, Ballard saw that Argo was revealing something entirely unexpected: a mile-long trail of debris.

  As he watched the light debris pass across the video screen, he understood: the ocean is a fluid in motion. Thresher had exploded at around fifteen hundred feet, and the fragments had fallen to eighty-four hundred feet. The currents had worked with the debris for a long time before it hit bottom. The lighter the debris, the farther it traveled.

  Ballard turned the vessel directly up the debris trail. Within minutes, a crew member called out, “Wreckage!” The submarine’s rudder appeared at the edge of the impact crater. Suddenly it all became clear.

  Craven believed that finding Titanic was a cover story for secret operations, just as Craven’s deep-submergence rescue vehicle had been. He said that was just the way it worked. “Special intelligence projects have cover projects that are top secret,” he explained. “Then you have secret projects covering the top-secret projects while confidential projects cover the secret projects. Each project covers the one below, all the way up to the public story, such as DSRV or Titanic, which is the story you tell the press and the public. But the trick is that they all must be true. They’re not lies, they’re real projects.”

  “My goal was to find the Titanic,” Ballard insists. “No doubt about it.”

  I asked Craven if it would be fair to say that he had, taking the long view, led Ballard to Titanic. “Oh, we’re much more Machiavellian than that,” he said with a laugh, adding mysteriously, “The Thresher-Scorpion survey mission wasn’t the seventh veil. It wasn’t even the sixth veil.”

  Once Ballard had actually located Titanic and completed surveying the ship, he took off his explorer’s hat and put on his Naval Intelligence hat. He declared all data from the site classified top secret before reaching port. Photographs were placed in safes, which had been put on the support ship, Knorr, by Naval Intelligence. The Naval Intelligence officer on board changed the combinations. When Knorr arrived at Cape Cod, she was greeted by a lawyer representing the secretary of the navy. Everything was rushed into a white sedan, which drove to Otis Air Force Base, where the materials were placed on a flight to the Pentagon. Ballard said that it was merely a way to control the release of priceless photos of Titanic to a hungry international press. This is undoubtedly true. This is undoubtedly one of many truths.

  One morning I watch him tour his construction site with local members of the Mohegan Indian Tribe. The Mohegans, like the Pequots who run a nearby casino, are the beneficiaries of a booming tourist business. A dozen Native Americans in suits and ties and white plastic hard hats shuffle after Ballard, trying to keep pace as he leaps around the cast concrete molds, gesticulating and trying to shout above the roar of diesel engines.

  The Mohegan elders nod in gaping solemnity as Ballard, in his rapid-fire military way, makes declarations of what his Institute for Exploration will bring to the area. It is meant to be the hub from which all of Ballard’s future expeditions will be mounted. Ballard hopes the new aquarium will generate enough money that he will no longer have to engage in raising funds all of the time. He aims to create a self-sufficient museum for recording whatever history of mankind can be brought up from the ocean floor. The fruits of those expeditions would then be carried back to the institute for interpretation and display.

  He’s had other big ideas. Among them was the JASON Project, which has allowed two million junior high school students to travel on Ballard’s expeditions remotely via the internet. While Ballard (or one of his robots) is down there inspecting a sunken wreck, the students can see in real time exactly what he sees. They learn how to manipulate cameras and in some cases are allowed to control the movements of the unmanned submersibles. In addition, Ballard has a long list of exploration projects—to the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the mouth of the Hudson River, and other locations—stacked up into the future like planes over LaGuardia.

  After Ballard finishes with the Mohegans, we once more sketch our jerky course into a wintry landscape under a cold Thanksgiving sky. As the black Mercedes gobbles up the picturesque landscape, I gently suggest that the US Navy isn’t interested in Roman galleons that sank two thousand years ago in the Black Sea. Ballard plans to go there the next year, and the navy is helping to sponsor the trip.

  Ballard says, “I think the navy has helped me because they genuinely have wanted to help me.”

  I respond with something like “Oh, come on. They don’t want Roman galleons.”

  “No. No, they don’t.” At once his voice becomes uncharacteristically quiet.

  “Okay,” I say. “So what do they get out of it? Why the Black Sea? The Mediterranean?”

  When I first met Ballard, he told me, “The navy has stopped doing secret missions. The war is over. There are no submarines left.” Yet even his wife has been given secret clearances—just so she can be his wife. Some months have passed since Ballard and I began our sojourn together, and the story has evolved. Somewhat stiffly, he informs me that he is a senior scientist emeritus at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “We have navy money for my Deep Submergence Lab to develop technology,” he tells me.

  “They want the technology that your expeditions develop?”

  “They want technology. And they also ask me what to do with it. They send navy personnel on board with us. Look. Let me explain something. Take Saddam Hussein, for example. He put out a very crude minefield in the ocean,
and it prevented the marines from landing. They were furious. Well, we could help. We live in their battlefield and know it better than they do. We know that environment. So we are developing mine countermeasures, robotics that could deal with undersea minefields. We’re working on launching remotely piloted vehicles from torpedo tubes. We discovered internal waves that could flip a submarine. That’s what I sold them, and that’s why they want to pay to have me down there.”

  He describes an undersea gunnery range “on the tongue of the ocean,” as he puts it. “It’s wired up for war games, and they fire weapons there.” The navy has donated a submersible called Turtle to Ballard’s new aquarium. Turtle was conceived as a service vessel for that undersea war games field. It would scavenge lost weapons and bring them back. It was built down the road at Electric Boat on the Thames River. The navy is constantly looking for new toys like this, and Ballard is one of the chief players in that business.

  The war is not over. They still do secret missions. And there are plenty of submarines left.

  “Besides,” Ballard sums things up, “I’m good news. I’m not Tailhook or Watergate. They can point at me and say, ‘Look. Look what he’s doing.’”

  “So do you think John Craven’s crazy?” I ask. Craven is convinced that Ballard is the navy’s new Dr. Strangelove. Based on what Ballard has just told me, that sounds about right.

  “Not crazy. Eccentric,” Ballard says. “He wants credit for his career. Everything he ever did was secret. Who wants their life shredded when it’s over?”

  I appreciate the fact that Ballard can’t tell me what would prompt the navy to be interested in his visit to the Black Sea. So I ask Craven his opinion. “No, I can’t tell you, either,” he says. “And yes, you can figure it out for yourself. Is this an area of strategic and military concern? Do you think that military hardware of significance has been lost in the Mediterranean or the Black Sea? Do planes that land on carriers sometimes not land and sink instead? You want to know what’s in the Mediterranean and Black Sea? This is Davy Jones’s locker. You just have to ask yourself, What’s in Davy Jones’s locker?”