8. Alvin and the Deep, Dark Sea
Mac McCamis had a problem. Alvin, the miniature submarine he piloted, was acting up. Alvin and her crew had arrived at Rota Naval Air Station in Spain, about 350 miles down the coast from Palomares, after a grueling trip on a prop plane from the United States. Alvin was a curious-looking little sub, twenty-two feet long, with a white bulbous body and a fiberglass “sail” towering over the hatch. To fit her on the cargo plane, the crew had separated Alvin into several large pieces and strapped the parts onto wooden pallets. Now they had reassembled the sub and were attempting a test dive — or rather a test dunk — off a pier at Rota. A crane slowly lowered the rotund, three-man submersible into the water as the crew watched. Water soon covered three-quarters of Alvin; only the top still bobbed on the surface. Suddenly, a battery shorted out. The crew sighed. One of them signaled the crane to lift Alvin from the water and lower her back onto the pier.
Mac and another Alvin pilot named Valentine Wilson had flown with Alvin on the plane from the United States, and the ride had been bone-jarring. During the flight, Wilson swore he could have stood still and passed a rod under his feet, the vibrations jolted him so far up off the floor. Mac figured the same vibrations must have shaken something loose in Alvin. The crew removed the batteries and — sure enough-found that the connector plates had loosened, letting water leak in. They opened every battery case, then drained and cleaned each battery.
When it came to mechanical matters, Marvin J. McCamis, known universally as “Mac,” almost always guessed right. In 1966, Mac was in his forties but still wiry and strong as a teenager, his eyes bright and intense beneath his flat-top buzz cut. He never exercised but could crank out one-arm pull-ups without breaking a sweat. According to Alvin lore, he had once gotten into an argument with an Air Force officer in a bar and the two had agreed to fight it out. The officer had grabbed Mac in a martial arts hold, threatening to break his finger unless he gave in. Mac had simply stared the officer down until his finger finally snapped.
As a teenager, Mac had dropped out of high school, enlisted in the Navy, and trained as an electrician. He spent twenty years in Navy submarines and developed a deep, innate understanding of underwater mechanics. But despite his long service and experience he remained prickly and temperamental. He had little respect for, or patience with, people who lacked mechanical skill and who failed to see things his way. “He was totally uneducated and unpolished,” said Chuck Porembski, an electronics engineer who worked with McCamis. “That's why he often got into trouble.”
The Office of Naval Research, which owned Alvin, had called Mac's group on January 22, asking them to join the search in Spain. By that point, the Navy knew that the fourth bomb might have fallen into the Mediterranean. The water at Simo's sighting was just over 2,000 feet deep, unreachable to divers. Minesweepers had scored plenty of sonar hits in the area but couldn't identify them further. The Navy hoped that Alvin could dive deep and investigate the sonar contacts.
At the time of the call, the Alvin crew had been finishing its annual “teardown,” taking every last bit of the little sub apart, checking and cleaning every component, and screwing it all back together.
The group was based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, called WHOI (pronounced “who-ee”) for short. But that winter, they worked in an empty airplane hangar at nearby Otis Air Force Base, which offered more space than WHOI. They had been tearing Alvin apart since November, freezing their tails off in the cavernous hangar. An adjoining building, which housed the bathrooms, had the only running water. The Alvin crew ran hoses from that building, across the frozen ground, to get water into the hangar. Often the hoses would split and leak, the spurting water freezing into fantastic ice formations. The crew kept warm, or tried to, with sweaters and space heaters.
Earl Hays, the senior scientist of the Alvin group, called the crew together and told them about the situation in Palomares. The Navy wanted Alvin in Spain, he said, but this was strictly a volunteer mission. Anyone could back out if he wished.
This was not an idle question. Alvin was an experimental sub. It had first submerged to its test depth — 6,000 feet — the previous summer, under the critical watch of Navy observers. On that dive, all three of Alvin's propellers had failed, leaving the sub deep in the ocean with no propulsion. But Alvin could float even if she couldn't be steered, and she had made it to the surface safely. Prior to the test, Earl Hays had wisely created a set of code words so he and the pilots could discuss mechanical problems without the Navy brass understanding. The Alvin crew had played it cool, and the Navy was impressed. The next month, the sub had had her first (and only) real mission, inspecting a secret array of Navy hydrophones near Bermuda. But Hurricane Betsey had stormed through, allowing Alvin to make only three dives. When she had actually managed to get below 3,000 feet, her propellers had stopped without warning, then inexplicably started, then stopped again. Before heading home, the crew had managed one additional dive, to 6,000 feet. This time, the propellers had worked but the underwater telephone had not. The sub was a work in progress.
Diving in Alvin was a risky endeavor, and now Earl Hays was asking the group to fly to Spain, to find — of all things — a hydrogen bomb. He asked if anyone wanted to back out. Nobody did.
“We knew the country had a big problem and had to clean it up,” said McCamis. “Alvin had never done a project like this before. And we had no idea what we was getting into, but we was willing to try.” McCamis also hoped the mission would all ow Alvin to strut her stuff in front of skeptics. “It hadn't proven itself to the scientific parties or the military,” he said. “No one was really paying any attention to it.” Art Bartlett, another electronics engineer on Alvin, agreed. He thought, “This is it. If we can go pull this off, we're in good shape.”
Bartlett had another reason to volunteer for the trip to Spain — he wanted to get off Cape Cod and out of the freezing airplane hangar. The crew scrambled to prepare Alvin and pack their gear. On February 1, a cargo plane carrying seven Alvin crew members and 35,346 pounds of gear took off from cold, windy Otis Air Force Base and headed toward Spain. The next day, the plane carrying McCamis, Wilson, and Alvin followed. Bartlett stepped off the plane at Rota and smiled up at the blue, 70-degree sky and the shining sun. Woods Hole had given him $500 spending money, and the young engineer felt as if he had hit the lottery. His colleague Chuck Porembski had brought a half bottle of scotch along for the mission. He said later that he should have brought more.
When the Navy created Task Force 65, it shouldered the responsibility of finding bomb number four if it had fallen into the water. This was no small burden, and the Navy threw everything it had into the effort. On the day it established the task force, it also formed a small committee in Washington called the Technical Advisory Group (TAG). The five men on the TAG, each with expertise in salvage, oceanography, or deep-ocean work, were supposed to find technology, people, and resources that might be useful to Admiral Guest and then swipe them from other missions and send them to Spain.
Looking around for deepwater gear, the TAG found that there wasn't much on offer. The Navy, along with civilian scientists, had long struggled to explore the deep ocean. But its work, never well funded, had always lurched forward in fits and starts. By the time of the Palomares accident, Alvin, the experimental, temperamental minisubmarine, represented some of the most advanced deep-ocean technology in the world.
The idea of Alvin had been born years before, in the mind of a geo-physicist named Allyn Vine.
When the United States dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vine, perhaps alone in the world, saw underwater implications. Someday, he thought, submarines might carry nuclear weapons. And someday, one of these submarines might become marooned or lose one of those deadly weapons on the ocean floor. If that happened, the Navy would need a deep-diving ship for rescue and salvage.
After the war, while Vine worked on underwater acoustics for the Navy at WHOI, the idea of a maneuverable, deep-diving submersible continued to grow in his mind. Vine thought that such a vessel could complement oceanographic research. And soon he saw another military justification for such a sub. By the 1950s, the Navy had built a secret underwater listening system called SOSUS
(Sound Surveillance System) to detect Soviet submarines. During the Cold War, SOSUS involved a network of underwater hydrophones, positioned on continental slopes and seamounts, listening for enemy subs. Miles of
