Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (44 page)

Lights and canisters also had to be ordered to depth. Even the foam used on ROVs contained little glass microspheres that were rated to depth. When you ordered the foam, that telegraphed the maximum operating depth of your vehicle; immediately, in the minds of people who knew the deep ocean, that narrowed the possibilities by 90 percent.

Only defined places in the ocean measure four thousand feet or ten thousand feet, and if you didn’t mention 220-volt electrical current, or ask about the availability of spare parts in Asian or European countries, that left two coasts in the United States. If nothing of significance was known to exist at that depth off one coast, that narrowed
the focus to the other, and the continental shelf sloped into the Atlantic at such a degree that depth alone revealed the distance from the coast to the work site. Then the talk started. If Brockett said he was looking for a deep-water work package, and he let slip that he was concerned about the watertight seals holding at eight thousand to ten thousand feet, and anything else in his speech or his mannerisms seemed to eliminate foreign countries, the talk in the community would go out as, “Hey, there’s a deep-ocean deal at about eight thousand feet off the East Coast.”

“That’s all you’d need to say to the people who know what’s going on,” said Tommy, “to warn anybody else who was trying to find the
Central America
to get out there sooner.”

To disguise the venture, Tommy and Brockett developed “fuzzy brackets,” parameters specific enough for engineers to solve the right problems, but not so specific they could figure out the project. For the deep-ocean people, Brockett framed the problem like this: We’re investigating doing work in a wide range of depths, and we’ve got to be able to cover them with one vehicle. We don’t want to have a different vehicle for four thousand feet than we would use at ten thousand feet. And for your cost estimation, it has to be capable of operating off either coast of the United States. If you see any problems going overseas, please quantify those.

Brockett contacted the five biggest deep-ocean companies and met with engineers from Florida to Southern California to Vancouver, B.C., trying to decide which company could use Tommy’s ideas to build a ten-thousand-foot system, or which one already had a system Tommy could adapt. Brockett never mentioned the name of his client or the kind of project or the target of interest or the location or the depth. He just jawed with everybody about deep-water recovery and what they saw on the horizon.

The meetings would go smoothly until someone asked the first sensitive question about the project and Brockett had to say, well, he really couldn’t talk about it. As soon as he said that, his counterpart grinned and got cagey.

“Now he’s more interested in picking your brain about the project,” said Brockett, “because his curiosity is driving him nuts.”

Two companies were so used to working with the military that the whole relationship was straightforward and formal and conducted with no grins whatsoever. At two other companies, the engineers were especially experienced and sophisticated in their understanding of the deep ocean, and Brockett knew them well. He wanted to bang heads with them, but these engineers also knew the lore and the names of the famous historic shipwrecks, had even tried to recover them, and they yearned to be in the same business Tommy was in. When Brockett framed the problem in fuzzy brackets, they grinned and poked at him with, “Okay, Brockett, we know something’s up,” and Brockett grinned too and tried to pick their brains while telling them nothing. But that wasn’t easy.

“When somebody’s sitting across the table that close and grinning ear to ear,” he said, “it’s difficult to sit there with a straight face answering questions and not let something out.”

Then Brockett discovered the perfect cover: Bob Ballard and the
Titanic
. He learned that if he phrased part of his requirements like, “and must be capable of recovering an array of objects in deep water,” the engineers always shifted to questions about the luxury liner. Then it was easy for Brockett to say, aw, shucks, he really was not at liberty to divulge the name of his client or the project, which convinced everyone it really was the
Titanic
.

W
HILE HE HAD
Brockett out schmoozing with the deep-ocean crowd, Tommy continued to experiment with designs for his own vehicle. He had contacted an ROV operator named John Moore, who lived in the little town of Bellingham, a hundred miles north of Seattle.

If you asked anybody in the worldwide offshore community from the North Sea to the Gulf of Mexico, Who is the best ROV operator in the business? they would say, John Moore. If you asked them, Who is the most temperamental, cantankerous sonofabitch they’ve even been around? they would say, John Moore.

“I have a foul temper,” Moore says of himself, “always have and probably always will. I am firmly convinced that the world is mostly populated with idiots.”

John Moore looked like the sheriff in a movie about a few bad outlaws trying to terrorize an otherwise peaceful and law-abiding citizenry.
He stood a lanky six-foot-two, his dark hair hanging near his shoulders in the back, his blue eyes intense above a thick, dark, droopy mustache. He never finished college. He putzed around for a couple of quarters at a small state college in eastern Washington, tried a few more quarters at Seattle University, and finally quit. “I was going to school majoring in drugs and girls, and that didn’t work too well,” said Moore. Then there were two years in the Coast Guard, which he found frustrating. “I didn’t like having to take orders from people that were stupid.”

But Moore’s stint in the Coast Guard whetted his desire to see more of the world. Not long after he got out of the Coast Guard, he bought a one-way ticket to England and looked up an American deep-sea diving company called Subsea International, where he was told to return the next day in boots and overalls. He stayed with Subsea for ten years, and during his second year, his boss sent him to London to learn about a new field in robotics, underwater Remote Operated Vehicles, ROVs. Some of the clearer heads in the deep-ocean community could see the waning of manned submersibles and the waxing of the deep-water robot. Moore got so good at operating these new ROVs—“big toys,” he called them—he began to design and build them himself and started doing things with them that dropped knowledgeable jaws.

Don Craft had once watched him for two hours pass a very small object through a very small hole at an extremely awkward angle, while he stared at a two-dimensional TV monitor and imagined the three-dimensional spatial differences that existed on the ocean floor where the robot sat a few thousand feet below. “Damn!” thought Craft.

Moore did so many wild things with robots that deep-ocean people liked to tell stories about him. Mike Williamson had worked with him on a project in about five thousand feet of water. One day Moore was in the control room at the monitor and something was wrong with the robot and no one could figure out what, so Moore stomped out of the control room onto the deck, leaned over the side, and started strumming the ROV cable with his fingertips.

“He’s out there with his eyes closed,” said Williamson, “holding this cable, feeling how that vehicle a mile below is responding. Then he’s giving course changes and orders to the pilot in the shack without even
looking at the sonar screen or the video. I thought that was pretty remarkable.”

After years of designing and installing ROVs, Moore decided he should receive more than operator’s pay, so he quit Subsea and told his bosses he was now a consultant. “You could hear the screams halfway around the world,” remembered Craft. “When it comes to technical matters, he is a tough sonofabitch to beat, I’ll guarantee you that. You would have to go to the world’s biggest ROV operators to find anybody that might possibly come close to him. Nowhere can you find anybody that has the range he has at that high level.”

In his research, Tommy had heard of John Moore, and judging from the man’s reputation, he thought Moore might be the one to help him build and then operate the vehicle he envisioned. “I chose mavericks,” Tommy once said, “because we had to do ‘the impossible.’”

Tommy called Moore in the fall of 1986, and they talked for over two hours. He told Moore he wanted to recover a shipwreck in deep water. He said the ship was probably substantially intact, and they discussed how to dismantle portions of it to gain access. By December, Tommy had Moore under contract, and for the next three months the two men talked on the phone several times a week, sometimes for hours.

Most deep-ocean clients who came to Moore said, This is the problem we want you to solve. Tommy said, Let’s talk about all of the problems that might arise and then we’ll evaluate a couple dozen solutions to each. “We worked through the methodologies and operating problems at length,” said Moore. “We did a lot of what-iffing, and, ‘Do you think we could do this? And what if we tried that?’”

Moore told Tommy that the big capital costs were in the cable, the propulsion, and the housings. He confirmed that a battery-operated ROV on a simple co-ax cable was the cheapest way to get to the bottom. Although the co-ax cable had limited capability, they could buy components off the shelf that would push more signals down the cable; they didn’t need expensive housings to protect the instruments on the bottom, they could use glass spheres; they didn’t have to send power down the cable, they could put battery packs on the vehicle itself. Most people would not design it this way, but it was possible. And it was the way
Tommy liked to think: How can we keep it simple and inexpensive by rethinking the whole approach?

I
N THE LATE
1960
S
, the U.S. Navy created a manned underwater environment called
Sea Lab
, and they hired Don Hackman at Battelle to design a machine shop for it, something that despite the water, extreme pressure, and corrosion would function like a machine shop on land. When Hackman finished, he could do anything underwater that anyone else could do topside, every tool impervious, sturdy, corrosion proof, and easy to use: drill presses, milling machines, grinders, sanders, kipping hammers, impact wrenches, welding explosives. Hackman could do it all underwater.

Hackman had been an engineer at Battelle for nearly twenty-five years. In 1981 he had coauthored for scientists and engineers the definitive treatise
Underwater Tools
. Although he designed medical tools and manufacturing plant automation devices and was lead designer in dozens of other specialized projects at Battelle, his reputation was as the foremost designer of underwater tooling in the world.

In his late forties, Hackman still had dark brown hair. His eyes were also brown and looked small encircled by the large, brown plastic frames of his glasses. He liked things efficient: Every few years he went down to the local Sears in Columbus and bought one dozen pair of black loafers, which he stored in his attic. He kept three pair going: one for the yard, one for church, and one for everything else; as the pair for the yard wore out, he threw them away, then he went up to the attic and broke out a brand-new pair for church, wore the old church pair to work the next day, and worked out in the yard in the pair he had worn to work the day before. The rest of his wardrobe consisted of three things: navy pants, navy shorts for hot weather at sea, and light blue shirts. Another engineer once came to a costume party dressed as “Don Hackman,” and no one missed the joke. Besides his wardrobe, Hackman was famous around Battelle for quotes like, “You can’t always be young, but you can always be immature,” which often led to a dirty joke or a sexist joke or an ethnic joke. He cared not one whit about correctness. “If I knew what I was,” he once said, “I’d tell jokes about that, too.”

Hackman was one of the engineers who had grilled Tommy on his experiences making things work in the ocean and then insisted that Don Frink hire the young man. For the three and a half years Tommy had worked at Battelle, his office had been around the corner from Hackman’s, and they saw each other frequently. Sometimes they worked together on projects, like redesigning exhaust manifolds on marine engines or creating a simulator for testing torpedoes.

Tommy had watched Hackman work, and he liked Hackman’s thinking. In his book, Hackman emphasized that the design of underwater tools had been “evolutionary” not “revolutionary,” and that was a problem: If divers wearing thick gloves can’t turn the little chuck key on an underwater drill, don’t make the key bigger, rethink the system. Tommy often talked to Hackman about whole systems that could work in the deep ocean, and gradually, noticed Hackman, Tommy’s questions about working in the deep ocean had drifted toward finding and recovering deep-water shipwrecks.

When Tommy talked about working in the deep ocean, Hackman mostly listened. He had worked for the oil companies and for the navy on projects similar to what Tommy talked about, and he considered the work “a real challenge.” He held twenty patents at Battelle because he tried things no one had thought of before; yet, when Tommy came to him with some of his ideas, even Hackman shook his head.

“As long as I’ve known him,” said Hackman, “he’s had these farout ideas, and when somebody comes and tells me, ‘I’m gonna go down two miles and get some treasure, would you help me on it?’ you know? ‘Uh, I’ve got more important things to do. My car needs polishing and my lawn needs to be mowed.’”

Tommy had taken a leave of absence from Battelle, and Hackman hadn’t seen him for several months. In the fall of 1986, after Tommy had been to sea with the SeaMARC, he called Hackman and asked if they could get together. Hackman said, “Let’s make it after work.”

When Tommy arrived at Hackman’s office, he told Hackman, “I’ve found a ship, and I need some serious work done now, and I’m ready for a contract.” He showed Hackman some of the sonagrams, and he told him two things about the wreck: It was a wooden ship resting in less than ten thousand feet of water. “I was more interested now that
he said he’d found something,” recalled Hackman. “Still very skeptical, but listening. ‘Okay, you haven’t convinced me, but you might.’”