Bright Shark
By Robert Ballard and Tony Chiu
Delacorte, 489 pages, $20
Rare is the writer of popular fiction who comes to the task with more authority than Robert Ballard, the greatest undersea explorer of the age, perhaps ever.
Equal parts geologist, oceanographer and engineer, the discoverer of the Titanic and the Bismarck has been at the top-or rather the bottom-of his risky business for 25 years. He has become both a historic figure and a supersalesman of science, a sort of Carl Sagan with gills.
Taking the plunge in his first novel, ”Bright Shark,” written with journalist Tony Chiu, Ballard provides a technothriller bristling with enough gadgetry and Navy lingo to do Tom Clancy proud.
No other comparisons to Clancy apply.
Curiously bloodless, with none of the apocalyptic fervor of the genre, the plot hinges on the powerful technology of underwater survey sleds fitted with computer-enhanced cameras, a technology that Ballard helped design and then pioneered in oceans around the world.
It was Ballard, in fact, a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod, who convinced science and the military that people could go down to the bottom of the sea in manned submersibles and find things with their eyes.
Ballard had spent his career exploring the volcanically active sea floor
(he once crashed a manned submersible into a mountain 20,000 feet down) but was virtually unknown to the public until summer 1986 when he plunked Alvin, his little submarine, onto the deck of the Titanic.
Since then, he has moved from exploit to exploit, most notably the Jason Project, in which millions of schoolchildren in museums join him in the excitement of live-action underwater archeology.
So now we have his novel. ”Bright Shark” begins in May 1988. An American research vessel is conducting routine tests 12,500 feet down in the Mediterranean west of Crete when its deep-sea robot suddenly spies a debris field.
The Navy lieutenant in charge, Edna Haddix (who`s the last heroine you remember named Edna?), recognizes the twisted metal as pieces of a submarine, possibly the Israeli naval ship Dakar, which vanished in 1968 without a trace. Quickly, troubleshooter Wendell Trent (Wendell? ) is sent by Washington to help Haddix locate the wreck, which lies 3 miles below.
Unbeknownst to them, governments on two continents are prepared to go the limit-even to an armed showdown on the high seas-to prevent disclosure of the damaging secrets that had been aboard the Dakar.
That`s the plot in a nutshell. The rest is technique. But what could there possibly be aboard a 20-year-old Israeli sunken sub that`s worth 489 pages? Perhaps Ken Fowler could concoct something.
Nor is the writing particularly felicitious.
Such sentences as, ”Alone on the afterdeck during the midnight-to-four, pacing to keep warm in the freshening wind, Haddix had continued picking at her misery as if it were a scab,” indicate the book needed an editor less in awe of Ballard.
Attempts to enliven the story with casual sex come off as crude and clumsy. Haddix even brushes off a young German who tries to pick her up by claiming she has herpes. And there`s not enough violence.
What Ballard does best is convey the excitement of underwater exploration and explain how it`s done. That`s enough.
