down a steep slope, about 70 degrees. Mac decided to follow the track by backing down the slope, so he could see it out the front window. Slowly, Mac edged down as Bartlett and Wilson called out directions. The sub reached about 2,500 feet. Then, the two men started shouting, “That’s it!” “That’s it!”
Outside, on the gray bottom, lay a massive parachute. Underneath, the men saw the shape of a bomb.
The task force had established code words for the search. If the Alvin pilots spotted the bomb, they were supposed to say the words “instrument panel.” Wilson, in his excitement, forgot the code and shouted over the phone, “We found a parachute and we believe we have a fin of the bomb in sight! It’s underneath the parachute!”
“Had a hell of a time shutting him up,” said Mac.
That morning, the USS Albany had arrived to relieve the Boston as Task Force 65’s flagship.
Admiral Guest invited the Albany’s captain to lunch before the ceremonial transfer of the flag.
During lunch, an aide burst into the room to hand Guest a slip of paper. The note read, “ALVIN reports INSTRUMENT PANEL.” Guest read it, rose from the table, and hurried off without explanation. Someone else would have to handle the ceremony.
On board the minesweeper USS Salute, lunch was also under way. Tony Richardson, Simo Orts, and the others had just started eating when the commanding officer entered the wardroom to tell the group that Alvin had sighted the weapon. The Navy men rushed off, leaving Richardson and Bruce to escort Simo back to the beach. When the group arrived at Camp Wilson, an Air Force helicopter flew them to Aguilas. John Bruce, the oceanographer, arranged to visit Simo the next evening to look at the fathometer trace. After all, there was still a chance that the Alvin crew was wrong.
Deep below the surface, Val Wilson snapped pictures of Alvin’s prize. Then Mac eased Alvin away from the parachute to avoid tangling the submersible in the straps or shrouds. He wedged the sub into a crevice just below the chute, so they could keep an eye on it and not accidentally drift away in the current. Then he shut off the lights to conserve power and waited for instructions from the surface. One of the men reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. Smoking was, of course, prohibited in the sub. But the three men, all heavy smokers, knew they might be down there for a while and decided to give it a go. Bartlett, the technician, knew the air system inside and out and figured he could pull this off without incinerating or suffocating the crew. He turned up the oxygen, gave the crew a good blast, then shut it off. They lit the cigarette and passed it around, inhaling deeply. Then Bartlett cranked up the CO2 scrubber, hoping for the best. McCamis and Wilson, having both served on submarines, could sense when the CO2 approached the danger zone. At least that’s what they told Bartlett, who watched the gauges and hoped they were right.
While they waited, the men discussed what to do if they accidentally hooked the bomb or the chute.
They all agreed that they could just drop a battery and surface, dragging the bomb with them.
Alvin’s total battery weight, however, was only about 750 pounds. The bomb weighed more than two tons. There was no way they could pull it up. The military had never told the Alvin crew how much the secret weapon weighed. It was the mushroom theory, said Bartlett: “Feed them shit and keep them in the dark.”
On the surface, Admiral Guest and Brad Mooney discussed options. Alvin could remain submerged for twenty-four hours — tops — if the pilots conserved power, meaning it had about twenty hours left.
Mooney suggested sending Aluminaut down to rendezvous with Alvin. If the larger sub carried a transponder, the surface ship Mizar could fix her position when she got near the bomb. The rendezvous was a risky proposition, and Mooney knew it. At that depth, the silt and snow scattered light, allowing even powerful beams to pierce only about sixty feet. And depending on a sub’s momentum, sixty feet might be too short to stop if the pilot suddenly saw trouble ahead. Generally, pilots avoided running two submersibles anywhere near each other under the sea. Mooney wanted to break this rule. What he proposed was much like sending two cars to meet in a midnight blizzard, on an icy road unfamiliar to both drivers. It would be dangerous, but it was their best option.
Guest readily agreed to the plan, liking the idea of keeping human eyes on the target. But he had difficulty comprehending the risk involved. “I can fly my F4s wingtip to wingtip at Mach speed and they don’t hit each other,” he told one staffer. “You guys can’t even go in the same area and stay out of each other’s way?”
Mooney summoned Aluminaut. The sub picked up a transponder, got a quick battery charge, and hustled over to the search area. Though disappointed that Alvin had found the bomb first, the crew was glad they had an important role to play On the way down, Admiral Guest and his staff told the Aluminaut crew, more than once, not to touch the bomb or try to recover it. “He thought we were a bunch of wild cowboys down there,” grumbled Art Markel.
The Alvin crew sat in the dark, on the bottom of the cold sea, for eight hours, waiting for Aluminaut.
Finally, peeking through their windows, the crew saw the glow of lights in the distance. “It was beautiful, the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” said McCamis. “A great silvery-pink monster, it looked like, with great green phosphorescent eyes coming up silent through the water.” Mac flipped on Alvin’s lights, giving Aluminaut a clear target. Aluminaut approached slowly, cautiously parking herself about twenty-five yards behind Alvin, in clear sight of the parachute. The Aluminaut held steady as Alvin left her station and rose to the surface.
Alvin surfaced after ten hours and twenty-three minutes underwater, her longest dive of the mission.
Mac sailed her to the Fort Snelling and entered the well deck at 8:12 p.m., just about the time that Guest and his staff arrived on board. The Alvin crew sent their photographs to be developed, then told the admiral what they had seen. The photographs were ready about midnight. The weary Guest gathered his key staff members to look at the pictures. They didn’t see a bomb. They saw a parachute. Everyone agreed that the weapon probably lay shrouded underneath, but they couldn’t tell for sure.
Mac McCamis was outraged. He knew it had to be the bomb. Guest asked him, “How do you know it’s not a parachute full of mud?” To which McCamis replied impatiently, “What else is going to be down there with a parachute and a bomb rack hanging on to it?” McCamis went to bed that night discouraged. “In all my life,” he said, “I’d never had my intelligence so insulted.” After the meeting, Admiral Guest wrote a situation report to his superiors, sending it at 2:50 a.m. on March 16. In it, Guest said that Alvin had photographed a large parachute covering an object. The contact was promising but not conclusive; positive identification was impossible. However, he was starting to plan the recovery. He planned to proceed as slowly and deliberately as possible, but if the object started to slide down the slope, he might have to take immediate action. He would use three ships, Mizar, Privateer, and Petrel, as the primary support vessels for the recovery, with two minesweepers on security patrol. All other ships would attend to business as usual. Guest didn’t want the newsmen on shore to notice anything odd.
The other memo, the one for the Cyrus Vance committee that had taken four days to write, was never sent.
Early on the morning of March 16, Robert Sproull, the chair of the Cyrus Vance committee, went to the Pentagon for the group’s second meeting. Sproull expected this gathering to be as gloomy as the first. He arrived around 4:30 a.m. to gather his thoughts and prepare for the meeting. He checked the message traffic, just in case there had been any developments in Spain, and found Admiral Guest’s report. The second meeting, Sproull remembers, went off rather well.
That morning in Rota, a radioman found Red Moody at the Bachelor Officers Quarters. Moody had stayed out late the night before, drinking with an old friend. The messenger handed Moody a clipboard, the cover indicating
