Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (22 page)

Hackman liked to phrase his questions to a new engineer so that only someone who had built things to work in the ocean could answer the question. “Have you designed underwater equipment?” he would ask. If they said yes, he wanted to know what kinds of materials they normally used, and he was waiting to hear, “I use either 316 or 304 aluminum.” All the young engineers said they knew their way around a machine shop, but Hackman wanted to know if they preferred a vertical mill or a horizontal mill. “Little questions like that,” said Hackman, “you can tell whether a person’s done it.”

Tommy was quick with his answers. When Hackman asked him about the hydroflow he had used on the
Arbutus
, Tommy not only could explain how he designed the suspension system, he could also describe what it felt like to be inside the thing with his skin undulating like a flag in the turbulence and his mask ripping off his face. He could talk firsthand about the dangers of manned submersibles and the problems with magnetometers and the latest theories on treating the bends in decompression chambers.

“If you’ve already done something like that at sea,” said Frink, “you’re going to impress the hell out of Hackman. Which is what Tommy did. Everybody voted they had to have Tom.”

But Frink was still concerned. “People like him are hard to work with,” worried Frink. “He’s a highly creative, almost driven individual. His work hours are not normal. He’ll work your buns off. He’ll burn out people.”

Frink’s biggest worry was, Do I have 100 percent of Tommy? Because Frink needed his engineers, as he was fond of saying, “body and soul, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Your subconscious has gotta be working for Battelle,” said Frink. Later he admitted, “I got more out of Tommy than I thought. Four years, five years, he stayed here.”

As Frink worried over how much of Tommy’s brain would be engaged on Battelle matters and what portion might wander elsewhere, one thought never occurred to him: that before long he and Don Hackman both would be working for Tommy.

I
N ONE OF
his frequent trips from Key West back to Columbus, Tommy had met an eclectic fellow named Bob Evans, a university student majoring in geology. Bob was trained and accomplished as a classical pianist, soon to be a jazz pianist, and was a collector of odd bits of information. He seemed to remember everything he had ever read, and his mind made so many connections so quickly that listening to him talk was like watching time-lapse photography. He also was good natured and unpretentious. “There’s all kinds of jokes,” he once said, “double entendres about the prowess of people in different occupations, like Divers Do It Deeper. Well, Piano Players Play with Themselves. They don’t put that one on coasters.”

Bob lived on one side of an old Victorian double near campus, and some of Tommy’s friends lived on the other side. Tommy and Bob had met through the sealed door in the basement during the blizzard of ’78, as Tommy was trying to get more heat to the other side of the house. They had talked through the door for half an hour but did not see each other until the following spring. Bob told a friend he had just met “an interesting individual with no face.”

Over the next three years, Tommy and Bob had visited from time to time as Tommy rolled into Columbus from Key West or half a dozen other places. Bob had graduated from Ohio State with his degree in geology and was consulting for the oil industry in Ohio. Now back in Columbus permanently, Tommy frequently putt-putted on his Zundaap scooter over to see Bob.

Bob loved to talk. He could get so cranked up, his shoulder-length blond hair would bounce and his droopy mustache would jiggle. He and Tommy would sit on Bob’s front porch, Tommy oiling his tongue with tequila and Bob loosening his with a more philosophical beverage like Wild Turkey neat. So lubricated, those tongues would wag far into the night, one seemingly dueling with the other, competing crescendos rising to such levels that friends present sometimes had to press hard on the stiff little flap of skin at the front of their ears. They’d talk about crazy things, like diamond mines in Canada and treasure troves buried by Indians and Mayan temples covered by water off the Yucatán. “Bob and Harvey, when you get them together,” said a friend, “become like one person in a funny way, their minds kind of meld and they know what the other is thinking and they get excited. They were always excited.”

Tommy told Bob about working with Mel Fisher off the Keys and John Doering down in Dominica. He told Bob there were places in the middle of the Caribbean where hundreds of old ships lay stacked on top of each other. That was one of the problems: How do you tell the ship you’re looking for from all of the other ships? They all had crashed in a shallow, high-energy environment exploding with storms and monster waves and currents that whipped the artifacts together like an egg beater. Tommy called it the “junkyard effect.”

And how do you know, he asked Bob, that the wreck you’re looking for hasn’t already been salvaged anyhow? Treasure hunters would research the king’s records in the Spanish archives, find nothing about a recovery, and assume the treasure was still at the site. But not everybody reported everything to the king, explained Tommy. There was contraband on those galleons. Or six months later, someone’s sailing by and sees wreckage on an island, and they say, Let’s find out what’s going on, so they talk to the Indians, and they dive on the ship. “A galleon
drafted about fifteen feet,” Tommy told Bob, “so they generally hit reefs in about fifteen feet of water. It is not like men to leave gold lying in fifteen feet of water.” Most of the artifacts Fisher had found were at twelve feet, and the only reason Spanish salvage divers had not completely stripped the
Atocha
in 1622 is because a second, far bigger storm had hit the wreck site three weeks later.

Treasure hunters had no control; that was the problem. They were subject to too many whims, of weather, of history, of government, of human nature, and that is why almost all of them failed. To succeed, they needed more control. They needed to analyze and reduce their risk. The treasure was there. During the three centuries following Columbus’s voyages to the New World, much of the gold and silver on earth had been transferred from the New World to the Old World, and 25 percent of it had been lost. But don’t search for it among the thousands of shallow-water shipwrecks in the Caribbean, said Tommy; the odds were too slim. Search for treasure where storms couldn’t buffet the remains, where ships were not piled on top of each other, where the bottom was hard and the currents slow, and where no government could stake a claim. Tommy told Bob he wanted to recover historic shipwrecks in the deep ocean.

I
N THE MORNINGS
Tommy reported to the Equipment Development Section at Battelle, where Don Frink quickly saw a side of him he had not guessed was there: his ability to impress sophisticated clients, like the supervisor of salvage in Washington, D.C., who was in charge of creating and developing dive and salvage equipment for the navy; or the Department of Interior, which was interested in deep-ocean mining. “Tommy was a good salesman for them,” said Frink. “He meets people well, he impresses the client, and these are people that know, and they generally know more than you know. He comes across as sincere, as What can I do to help you? And he’s got the knowledge to back it up. He was energetic, aggressive, active, and he made you feel good to be with him.”

Frink had wanted to use Tommy as a designer, developing equipment for the navy. But he saw a better use for him up one notch: looking at an overall systems approach to solving problems. The government
appeared ready to spend huge sums on deep-ocean mineral recovery, so Frink assigned Tommy to work on the concept of mining the deep ocean. Watching Tommy work, Frink noticed two things: how he carefully, almost maniacally, rationed his time, using tight priority lists; and how he amassed, assimilated, integrated, and turned out volumes of detail.

Tommy put in more hours than anyone at Battelle on the feasibility of mining the deep ocean. He talked to scientists and engineers around the country, trying to create a system that made sense economically and environmentally. He concluded that to mine the deep ocean would require “radically new technologies,” and that although they could create the technology, it would cost so much to develop the equipment and to operate it, that the value of the minerals would have to increase significantly to make it pay.

Tommy worked ten- to twelve-hour days and sometimes spent weekends at Battelle, but at night he continued thinking about ships lost in the deep ocean. There, all of the other problems with trying to recover historic shipwrecks went away, and the greatest problem remaining was technology. “And if I can figure out how to solve that,” he thought, “at least I’m throwing the problems back into my own hands, which I can control.” His research on deep-ocean mining had given him additional ideas on how to recover a deep-water shipwreck. Although the value of minerals would have to rise dramatically to warrant the cost of developing the technology to mine the deep ocean, a single ship with a large payload might be enough to persuade investors to give him the money he would need to create the technology that could penetrate that deep-ocean barrier.

Often ideas would come to him as he was falling asleep late at night, or he would awaken suddenly, his mind flooding with what-ifs and I-wonders. “Something might occur to me, then all of a sudden I can’t stop and it’s three in the morning and I’ve got to get up at six or seven. But when it starts coming, I can’t afford to disrespect it or disregard it. It’ll never look the same.”

He would get out his notebooks filled with new and old ideas, his notes from phone conversations, and he would make the connections and ponder the possibilities.

* * *

T
HE FIRST TECHNOLOGY
for working on the bottom of the ocean had come in the seventeenth century with the diving bell, a large air bubble trapped inside a housing. Sir Edmund Halley, discoverer of the comet, created a diving bell with glass viewing ports and freshened the air supply by lowering barrels of air that siphoned into the bell. Three men could remain inside at sixty feet for an hour and forty-five minutes, and they could salvage the armament of a ship sunk in the harbor by securing it with ropes and chains and letting another crew haul it to the surface with ship’s tackle. Three hundred years later, technology used in the deep ocean had advanced dramatically, but the work that could be accomplished there had changed little.

Prior to 1963, when the nuclear submarine
Thresher
had sunk in over eight thousand feet of water, navy scientists had already begun to lobby the Pentagon for a deep-water submersible that not only could go much deeper than submarines could go, but also could hold three people, have cameras and large viewing ports and a mechanical claw, and be able to move across the underwater landscape. Although the scientists had finally persuaded the navy to fund the project, the vessel was seen as the bastard child in the military fleet—no navy contractor would agree to build it. The navy had to go to a cereal company, General Mills, to build the tiny submersible, which would be called
Alvin
.

Two weeks after the
Thresher
tragedy, the secretary of the navy appointed a panel called the Deep Submergence Systems Review Group. Known as the Stephan Panel, the fifty-eight appointees had spent almost a year analyzing the military’s deep-ocean capability and recommending technology to explore the deep ocean and to recover artifacts lying on its floor. Within three months of the report, in June 1964, the world’s first maneuverable deep-water submersible, the
Alvin
, was christened in the presence of a lot of starched-white navy brass. Two years later, the navy gave the
Alvin
its first real test: to help defuse the most delicate and potentially deadly international incident in history.

An American Air Force B-52 bomber, flying a routine mission over the Mediterranean, had collided with an airborne tanker during refueling off Palomares, Spain, and the fiery wreckage had fallen thirty thousand feet, scattering across an area of land and sea ten square
miles. In that wreckage were four hydrogen bombs, each with seventy times more explosive power than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or enough to waste much of Spain and Portugal, parts of North Africa, and perhaps most of southern France. Authorities found three of the bombs on land, but the fourth parachuted into the sea. After divers searched the shallower water and found nothing, the navy brought in two deep-water submersibles, the new
Aluminaut
, a seventy-eight-ton behemoth good to eight thousand feet, and the two-year-old
Alvin
, capable of reaching six thousand feet. The admiral in charge described the search as like trying to find “the
eye
of the needle in a
field
of haystacks. In the dark.”

The
Alvin
dived ten times before the crew even spied the parachute billowing in the current at twenty-eight hundred feet. And when the mother ship dropped grappling hooks for the pilots to wrap among the parachute shrouds, the bulky and unstable
Alvin
and its awkward manipulator made the attempt seem, as one of the pilots put it, “like a drunken Swede trying to eat spaghetti with chopsticks.” Twice they hooked on to the bomb and tried to winch it up, but both times they dropped it and couldn’t find it again, once for nine days. After the parachute engulfed and nearly became the death shroud for the
Alvin
and her crew, the navy brought in its new ultra equipment, an underwater robot called CURV, for Cable-controlled Underwater Research Vessel, a sled equipped with lights, cameras, and a claw. But even CURV could not recover the bomb. When the claw moved, silt roiled from the bottom and blocked the cameras for fifteen minutes, then the parachute suddenly billowed and wrapped itself around CURV like a straitjacket. The robot couldn’t move. Finally, the crew topside winched the robot back to the surface, and the parachute and the bomb came with it.