War of the Whales (11 page)

SOSUS signal processing in the late sixties was crude compared to the supercomputers deployed in the seventies and eighties. But they were good enough—with the help of protractors, slide rules, and Balcomb’s HP-65 hand calculator—to fix a sub’s position within a few miles. Close enough for Pacific Command to dispatch a plane from a carrier deck or a Navy airfield to sprinkle the area with short- to medium-range sonobuoys. These floating minitransmitters deployed both active and passive sonar to get a better fix on the sub’s location and bearing.

Once the target was positively located and identified, it was simply a matter of “delousing” the pest. If it was a boomer carrying ballistic missiles, Pacific Command would assign a US hunter-killer sub to tail it—ideally, without being detected. If the boomer were ever to flush its missile chambers and begin its launch sequence, the hunter-killer sub would be in position to take it out before its missiles launched.

Of course, the Soviets assumed their boomers were being tailed, as did their American counterparts. And boomers were well aware of their vulnerability to the smaller, torpedo-armed attack subs. It was all a part of the elaborate cat-and-mouse game that the two antagonists played in deadly earnest throughout the Cold War. But the Soviet sub commanders
didn’t
know that the deck was stacked against them—by SOSUS. Within days or even hours of leaving their home port in Vladivostok, they were tagged, sorted, and tracked for the duration of their tour.
⁷

•  •  •

The biggest challenge, from Balcomb’s end of the acoustic telescope, was sorting out the submarine sound signatures from the clutter of other sound signals in the deep sound channel.

Back in 1953, Jacques-Yves Cousteau wrote a bestselling book,
The Silent World
, which he then made into an Academy Award–winning documentary.
⁸
The underwater photography of the previously opaque oceans certainly
appeared
eerily quiet. But as soon as SOSUS operators began listening in on the deep sound channel, they discovered that the oceans are anything but silent.

The sound channel funneled a symphony of low-frequency sound waves: from seismic activity such as oil exploration, undersea earthquakes, and volcano eruptions; surface weather patterns including lightning strikes, thunderstorms, and typhoons; as well as the everyday drone of commercial shipping and recreational boating.

The most perplexing sound signals came from “biologicals,” which was the Navy’s label for any sound it couldn’t identify as man-made or weather related. The croaks, hisses, moans, groans, clicks, snaps, crackles, and pops heard through the sound channel were presumed to emanate from marine life, but when SOSUS first went on line in the 1950s, no one could tell which animals were making which sounds—some of which sounded like submarine noise. To decode the biological cacophony in the sound channel, the Office of Naval Research turned to a marine biologist–engineer team at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: William Schevill and Bill Watkins.

Schevill had worked for the Navy in antisubmarine acoustics during the war. In peacetime he became curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, where he taught in the biology department. Bill Watkins knew nothing about marine mammals when he came to Woods Hole to help Schevill compile the Navy’s catalogue of underwater biological sounds in the 1950s. But he was already an accomplished linguist, having learned 30 African languages growing up in French Guinea, West Africa, where his missionary father translated the King James Bible into local dialects.

Watkins and Schevill began their project with a blank slate. The personal journals of mariners and whalers had described the moaning of large baleen whales they heard through the hulls of their ships. But no one had ever figured out how to listen to specific marine life underwater and identify the source. Watkins and Schevill decided to record from small boats for optimal maneuverability and to keep a low acoustic profile in the water. Watkins invented compact underwater microphones using a novel combination of salt crystals and refined castor oil. Then he built customized “suitcase amplifiers” out of solid-state transistors, and adapted a tape recorder from a hand-crank phonograph drive.

Schevill’s challenge was how to match the sounds that Watkins recorded to their biological source. His zoology museum at Harvard consisted mostly of scavenged bones and skeletons. Schevill couldn’t visually identify most of the marine mammals or other marine life in the ocean. So he devised a brutally efficient deductive process for classifying bioacoustic sounds: when Watkins’ hydrophones picked up a biological sound, they’ d maneuver their small boat close enough to confirm the source. Then they’ d capture and kill the animal, skin it down to its bones, and ship the skeleton back to the zoology museum. When the collected specimen matched a skeleton at the museum, they would fill in the name of the species alongside the recording log.

They followed the same protocol with fish and shellfish, some of which turned out to be surprisingly vocal. They recorded and identified choruses of fish and colonies of snapping shrimp. Some fish produce sound by rubbing their skeletal parts together, in the same fashion as a cricket rubs its wings. Others use powerful “sonic muscles” in their bladder to make noise, a process called drumming. Snapping shrimp produce a loud popping sound by crushing air bubbles between their claws, like kids popping bubble wrap.

Their decades-long acoustic safari took Schevill and Watkins across the globe, from the South Pacific to Japan, from the South Atlantic to the Arctic Circle. They even received clearance to use SOSUS surveillance stations to extend their census. At the first demonstration SOSUS station in Bermuda, they recorded the melodious moaning of humpback whales as they migrated past. Watkins and Schevill would continue their collaboration for 40 years, compiling a database of 20,000 calls from more than 70 marine mammal species. In 1962 they published a phonograph recording, “Whales and Porpoise Voices,” featuring the first underwater recordings of 18 species of marine mammals. But they weren’t able to publish their research, which all remained classified. For decades, the only end-users of their extensive database of bioacoustic recordings and data were SOSUS officers like Balcomb.
⁹

For Balcomb, the Watkins-Schevill catalogue of biological sound signatures was a seminal part of his education as a whale researcher. What made the biggest impression on Balcomb, when he listened to their recordings and listened live through the SOSUS hydrophones, were the low-frequency calls of the solo journeyers among the great whales: the blue whale, the sei, and the fin whale. These were the species that foraged and migrated alone along 1,000-mile trajectories across whole hemispheres. Like every other animal on earth, they had to communicate with others of their species, if only to mate. It was clear that millions of years before Ewing was detonating bombs in the deep sound channel, the ocean’s biggest whales had discovered and deployed the same sonic bandwidth to communicate across whole ocean basins. He had no idea
what
they were saying in their encrypted code of moans and groans. But they were clearly engaged in conversation across the sound channel’s party line.
¹⁰

•  •  •

Balcomb accepted the cloak of secrecy surrounding SOSUS as part of his job description. The submarine arm of the Navy was known as “the Silent Service” because of the extreme secrecy it demanded of all submariners. So it made sense to him that antisubmarine warfare would also operate in a black box. The code of silence bound him closer to his fellow sonar operators, but it created a lot of blank spaces in his marriage to his second wife, Julie.

Balcomb’s closest companion in those years was his long-haired Australian sheepdog, Wizerella. On weekends, they would walk the beach in search of specimens, with Wizerella running up ahead of him to root out anything that stank. Over the course of his tour at Pacific Beach, they beachcombed all 300 miles of the Washington coastline. In 1970 he found a Cuvier’s beaked whale that had stranded about three months earlier, to guess from the state of the carcass that was lodged under a layer of driftwood logs. Even Wizerella was disgusted by the stench—
after
she had rolled around in its rotted remains. The head measured six feet in diameter, and it was a Herculean task getting it off the beach. That skull remained Balcomb’s proudest trophy for years.

By 1972, his five-year commitment to the Navy was up. So, apparently, was his marriage. Julie wanted to return to Key West. Balcomb wanted to study marine biology in grad school in Santa Cruz. They agreed that their marriage had run its course. If nobody’s feelings got hurt, it was probably because there weren’t deep feelings involved on either side. Balcomb sold his only worldly asset, his Mercedes Gullwing, for $9,000 to pay for the divorce. Truth be told, it was harder for him to part with that car than with Julie.

At the age of 30, Balcomb was no longer a brokenhearted boy in flight from a busted home. A seasoned Cold War veteran, he was ready to embark on his research career. He had to admit that his stepfather had been right. Military service had made a man of him.

Lieutenant Balcomb with his son, Kelley, during a visit to Midway Island, the Pacific, 1970.

6

The Stranding Goes Viral

Decades after he left the Navy, Balcomb was still a sharp observer of warships. Sitting at his cluttered desk back at the beach house, Balcomb scanned the videotape he’ d shot of the destroyer from the seaplane that afternoon. He squinted into the camcorder’s playback screen and hit the freeze-frame button when the destroyer’s bow came into view.

“I can’t make out the hull number,” he mumbled to himself. Then, to Ellifrit, who was shut inside the darkroom next door, he shouted, “What’s holding things up in there?”

Balcomb was normally patient with his young assistant. But stumbling onto the destroyer in the canyon had rattled him. If he could identify the ship, he reasoned, maybe he could piece together what the Navy was up to. He wanted to know what was going on—and he didn’t want to know. The Navy was the closest thing he’ d had to family, and it still stirred up feelings of attachment. He didn’t get all misty eyed about it, but it was a bloodline that ran deep.

Ellifrit emerged from the darkroom with a handful of wet enlargements and tacked them onto the corkboard behind the desktop computer. “We’ll see if you did any better with the stills,” he said.

Balcomb could barely make out the destroyer’s hull number on the enlargements. “DD-970,” he read aloud, typing the hull number into the search panel on the
Jane’s Naval Weapons Systems
website, the go-to database of all things military. “It’s the USS
Caron—
a Spruance-class destroyer. What’s a Spru-can doing down here?”

Ellifrit peered over Balcomb’s shoulder as he scrolled through the catalogue of the
Caron
’s standard armaments: Mark 29 missile batteries, ASROC antisubmarine rocket launcher, Tomahawk cruise missiles, Phalanx antiaircraft guns, Aegis air and surface radar.

“Those choppers parked on the back deck,” said Balcomb, “are Sikorsky Seahawks—antisubmarine warfare birds.” Balcomb scanned down to “Sensors and Surveillance” and found the sonar transmitter: AN/SQS-53, aka 53-Charlie. “State-of-the-art in hull-mounted active sonar,” he explained. “Search, detection, and tracking, all tied into ship-based computerized processing.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning someone’s playing war games in Great Bahama Canyon.”

Balcomb wanted the room to himself, so he told Dave to get himself some dinner. If the Navy had a carrier group in the Bahamas, Balcomb figured that Gisiner would be working late. He was.

“Gisiner, here.”

“Bob, this is Ken. Good news. We found a great specimen today. A Blainville’s, fresh enough to eat. And I spotted another one from the air that I’m going to collect in the morning.”