Mac thought they had covered B-29 frontways and back and the time had come to move on. This decision, however, like so many others, was not his to make. The Fort Snelling maneuvered into position and opened its well deck, allowing Alvin to sail out into the waves. Mac directed the Alvin pilots to dive. As the sub disappeared beneath the surface, Mac hatched a plan.
Today, three weeks after their arrival in Spain, Alvin pilots Bill Rainnie and Val Wilson were piloting the sub, with Frank Andrews as a guest observer. Andrews had asked Earl Hays, the senior scientist for the Alvin group, for a ride in the sub. Hays, who didn't feel compelled to tell Admiral Guest who rode in Alvin or why, much less ask the admiral's permission, often gave the observer spot to old friends and VIPs. Andrews, being both, squeezed in for the ride.
To dive, Rainnie and Wilson vented Alvin's ballast, blowing a froth of bubbles to the surface. The sub, now five hundred pounds negatively buoyant, sank slowly toward the bottom. As Alvin descended, the passengers felt no sense of falling. The three men sensed movement only by looking out the portholes and watching the “snow”—swirling clouds of tiny organisms — moving upward as the sea grew dark. When Alvin neared the bottom, the pilot flipped a switch and dropped two stacks of steel plates weighing a total of five hundred pounds. Now neutrally buoyant, the sub could cruise the area without floating up or down. (To make smaller adjustments in ballast-up to two hundred pounds positive or negative — the pilot could use Alvin's variable ballast tanks, which pumped seawater in and out.) When the time came to surface, Rainnie and Wilson would drop another five hundred pounds of steel plates and float to the surface. The plates would remain on the ocean floor, a trail of breadcrumbs marking Alvin's path.
The pilots and observer had their eyes glued to Alvin's three viewports — one in the front center and one on either side. (A fourth viewport, on the sub's belly, was hidden by the floor and rarely used.) Each window was a Plexiglas cone twelve inches in diameter on the outside, tapering to five inches diameter on the inside. Observers peeking out these tiny windows could see only a narrow, V-shaped sliver of the world outside. Their fields of vision did not overlap; they could not see directly above, behind, or beneath the sub. Their view was further obscured by shadows, silt, and the distortion of water, which made outside objects appear closer than they were.
In Palomares, the visibility near the bottom was especially poor. On a good day, the crew could see about twenty feet. But if they accidentally brushed the bottom, the fine silt stirred into a dense cloud, an underwater sandstorm that could hang for fifteen to twenty minutes. And because the surface ship could position them within only a few hundred yards, pilots basically had to navigate on their own.
In order to steer a straight line, a pilot had to look at his compass, peer out the tiny porthole, get a glance at the bottom, and look back at the compass. It was, said McCamis, like trying to walk “a straight line in a snowstorm.” In much of the search area, the bottom stretched before them gray and featureless, with no vegetation or landmarks for guidance.
On March 1, as usual, Alvin was “flying a contour.” The area loomed with steep slopes and deep gullies, mimicking the mountains alongside Palomares. The plan called for Alvin to stay at a consistent depth while flying along an undersea slope, looking for something lying on the hillside and snapping photos along the way. When they had finished searching the area at one depth, they could move deeper.
Mac McCamis, however, had lost patience with B-29. He noticed that Alvin was near an adjacent search area, C-4, closer to the actual point where Simo had seen the “dead man” hit the water. Mac asked the support ship's captain if he could “play stupid” and steer Alvin out of its assigned space.
“You're the controller,” said the captain. “Why not?”
McCamis seized the moment and sent the sub into the new area. Near the end of the dive, pilot Bill Rainnie spotted something on the bottom.
“Wait a minute, I see something,” Rainnie said.
“What?” Wilson asked.
“I'm not sure, a little to the left, that's it, no, dammit, you went over it, to the right.”
“What?”
“To the right, dammit! That's it, right on target.”
“What is it?”
It's nothing, Rainnie said. Never mind.
The pilots saw nothing else of interest and surfaced soon afterward. Mac's gamble, it seemed, had been a bust.
When they arrived back on the Fort Smiling, the pilots handed off their film for developing. That night at their briefing, the Alvin crew gathered around the latest batch of photos. Mac, looking at the pictures, spotted something odd — a curious track in the sediment. It looked, he said, “like a barrel had been dragged over the bottom, end to end.” Brad Mooney agreed with Mac. “To me, it looked like a torpedo had slid down,” said Mooney. “It had a curved shape to it, all the way down.” The pilots were excited. What they were seeing, they hoped, was the track of bomb number four sliding down the undersea slope. The next day, this time with official permission, the Alvin crew returned to the area to look for the track. They couldn't find it. They returned on March 3, 4, and 7, combing the bottom, going over and over the area where they had photographed the track. Nothing.
On March 8, the day of Ambassador Duke's swim, the task force suddenly yanked Alvin off the trail and sent her to search a shallow inshore area. Near the beach, some undersea gullies plunged too deep for Navy divers to search. Most likely, Admiral Guest had sent Alvin to investigate these gullies so he could check another square off his chart. But whatever the admiral's intentions, the Alvin crew received no explanation for the sudden change and no information about when they could return to the promising track. The move, which seemed completely arbitrary, demoralized the crew and hardened their attitudes toward Guest. “My turn at surface control,” grumbled Mac, “and we're still messing around in 800 feet of water.”
By the third week in March, the mood of the searchers had settled into a mix of frustration, boredom, determination, and despair. Alvin moved back to deeper water but couldn't find the mysterious track. Aluminaut, likewise, was coming up empty-handed. The Ocean Bottom Scanning Sonar, Task Force 65's only unmanned deep search system, made nine runs over a dummy test shape and couldn't find it. On March 12, an OBSS towed by the USS Notable snagged a ridge, snapped its line, and never came up from the bottom.
The divers had wrapped up most of their inshore search, leaving Red Moody without much to do.
Guest asked the long-faced Moody if he wanted to head home to Charleston. With little work left for him in Spain, Red agreed. On March 14, Red Moody flew to Rota Naval Air Station to catch a plane home.
Ambassador Duke, picking up on the mood in Palomares and catching wind of the shifting tone in Washington, sensed that the search might soon be called off. Trying to ensure his role in the endgame, Duke wrote to Jack Valenti, special assistant to Lyndon Johnson: Madrid, March 14, 1966
CONFIDENTIAL
Dear Jack:
Word has reached me that Cy Vance is heading up an interdepartmental group to cover all aspects of the search and recovery operations in connection with the nuclear weapon problems here in the Palomares area of Spain.
This brings to mind the possibility that the search for the missing device might be called off. The Spanish Government, of course, is not unaware of this possibility, and I foresee no irreparable damage to our relationships if such a decision is handled extremely carefully and properly. Through other channels I am suggesting to the Department that thought be given to my being called back to go over in great detail how such a step should be handled. I have in mind recommendations such as a hand-carried letter from the President to the Chief of State here giving him personal reassurances in the matter.
I write you now (events happen so fast) in order to head off any possibility of premature announcements,
