several pingers and transponders so the Mizar could track the device, a strobe light, a bucket containing 190 feet of carefully coiled nylon line with a grapnel on the far end, and another 150 feet of coiled nylon line ending with a hook.
Aboard the Mizar, Moody and his team rigged up a length of 3?-inch nylon line with a breaking strength of 22,000 pounds. At the end they attached an anchor; thirty-eight feet above the anchor, they fastened POODL with a wire strap. In addition to the lines carried by POODL, they attached another 300-foot line, with a grapnel on the end, to the anchor itself. The plan was to lower the entire contraption-anchor, POODL, and all — into the water and, they hoped, land it near the bomb.
Then Alvin could swim over, pick up the three lines, and dig the hook and grapnels into the parachute.
That was the plan, anyway. Lieutenant Commander Malcolm MacKinnon, a naval engineer on Guest's staff, took one look at the half-built POODL and winced. “Oh, my God,” he thought. “It was really a kludge.”
MacKinnon was not being overly critical. Even Moody admitted that they had “gypsy-engineered” the rig. But POODL was the best and quickest option they had. The weapon's position was precarious, and the Navy worried that the bomb could slip down the slope into deeper water or fall into an underwater crevice and disappear forever. That fear overshadowed everything.
So on March 23, the captain of the Mizar positioned the ship over the bomb. Red Moody and his team dropped the anchor, with POODL attached, off the Mizar. Soon, the anchor and POODL hit bottom, their line stretching to the surface. Sailors grabbed the line, hooked it to a buoy, and floated it on top of the water. Then they waited to see what Alvin could do.
POODL was not the Navy's first recovery plan. Soon after Alvin had found the bomb, it had carried a light line down to the bottom. The end of the line was tied to a fluke, which the Alvin pilots dug into the sediment near the bomb. The Navy planned to slide a heavier line down this messenger line, but when they tried, the fluke pulled out of the bottom. On March 19, the task force members tried another tactic: they coiled some lines on the Mizar's instrument sled and tried to float the sled near the bomb. But the Mizar crew couldn't hold the sled steady, and they abandoned that plan, too. After this attempt, McCamis and Wilson visited the bomb in Alvin and reported that it had slid twenty feet downslope. That evening, Admiral Guest wrote a pessimistic situation report to his superiors. He faced bad weather, untested equipment, experimental techniques, a precarious target position, and submersibles that needed constant maintenance. He warned that the recovery might take a while.
Other ideas arose. Art Markel thought Aluminaut could lift the bomb and devised a plan. On its hull, Aluminaut carried a camera mount that could pan and tilt, and Markel proposed building a makeshift arm by attaching a wooden or metal pole to the camera mount. The pole would carry a metal hook, which the pilot could loop into the parachute. The hook would be attached, via cable, to Aluminaut's emergency ballast, a 4,400-pound lead weight on its belly. Then, with the bomb securely hooked to the ship, Aluminaut could blow its ballast tanks and rise to the surface, with enough buoyancy to pull the bomb with it.
Markel was excited about the plan, mentioning it in several letters to Reynolds. This was Aluminaut' s chance, he wrote, to share some of Alvin's limelight. But Guest rejected the idea. If Aluminaut got into trouble, he reasoned, she might have to drop her emergency ballast, leaving him with a new problem: a two- ton bomb hooked to a 4,400-pound lead weight. Guest never explained his reasoning to the Aluminaut crew, however, and this brush-off — the latest in a string of them — left the crew bitterly disappointed. “It is quite apparent that CTF 65 does not want Aluminaut in the act if they can help it,” Markel wrote. “I am quite disgusted over this whole mess.” Markel had half a mind to take his lifting rig to the sunken ship of antiquity and hoist a cannon to the surface. That would show the world what Aluminaut could do.
As the recovery plan slogged forward, the press got antsy. On March 22, the Los Angeles Times ran a pessimistic front-page article that was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune. The headline read, “H-Bomb May Slip into Deep Sea Crevice, Balk Recovery.” The article reported that the weapon was teetering on the edge of a steep undersea slope, in imminent danger of sliding into the abyss. “American officials here and at the scene are more pessimistic now about the situation than at any time since the search began,” said the article. “They are depressed at having come so near only to face the possibility that a stray undersea current and the peculiar bottom topography may rob them of success.”
Duke, disturbed by such gloomy press, asked permission to release regular progress reports without consulting the government of Spain. It is unclear whether he ever received a reply. But it is doubtful that Admiral Guest would have wanted to cooperate with such a plan; he had little interest in keeping the world press informed of his every move. In fact, he and his staff had become increasingly alarmed by the detailed information regularly appearing in the papers. There was a leak somewhere, and they didn't like it. The Air Force thought that someone in the Pentagon was talking to Washington reporters or that someone at Camp Wilson was chatting with the press. But Guest suspected the embassy in Madrid, perhaps even the ambassador himself. He didn't know Duke well, but he disliked the ambassador and didn't trust him. There is no evidence, however, that Duke passed illicit information to the press. Indeed, he seemed as mystified by the leaks as anyone.
On the morning of March 23, soon after Red Moody sent POODL to the bottom, McCamis and Wilson flew Alvin over to have a look. Mizar had landed the anchor and POODL about eighty feet from the bomb. When Alvin arrived at the site, the pilots saw that POODL had landed on the bottom and fallen over, spilling its lines into a tangle. Alvin tried to reach through the metal bars to grab the lines but couldn't. It then picked the remaining line off the anchor and tried to attach it to the billowing chute. With the pilots still getting used to the mechanical arm, the job proved difficult.
Finally, they hooked the line into the parachute. But by that time, Alvin's battery had run low and the sub had to surface. At the debriefing, the pilots reported that the bomb had moved about six feet and now rested in a small ravine.
The next day, Wilson and McCamis dove again. Again, they couldn't clear the tangled lines from POODL. They returned to the anchor line, which was already attached to the parachute, and tried to connect it more firmly. Alvin grabbed the grapnel and slowly, painstakingly twisted it into at least six parachute risers. Then the parachute billowed, and Alvin backed off. The pilots reported the news to the surface: they had snarled the grapnel in the chute. And, they added, the other two lines remained fouled on the POODL. The pilots couldn't possibly reach them.
Guest's staff met aboard the Mizar. The admiral did not want to lift the bomb with only one line, which seemed way too risky. But his staff pushed him to try. The breaking strength of the attached line, they argued, was ten times the weight of the weapon and rig combined. If they waited, the grapnel might work itself loose, or the line could tangle. Bad weather posed a constant threat. If the wind blew up, it could cancel operations for days. Washington and Madrid were losing patience. The sooner they recovered the bomb, the better.
Guest didn't like the idea. But eventually he was persuaded.
Guest's staff made a plan. Mizar would hover directly above the bomb, then winch it straight up through its center well, or moon pool. Once the bomb was safely off the seafloor, Mizar would pull it slowly toward shallow water, winching it up along the way. When the bomb was about 100 feet below the surface, EOD divers would attach two sturdy wire straps, and the bomb could be hoisted aboard a ship.
McCamis, still underwater in Alvin, heard that Mizar was going to attempt the lift. He asked if Alvin could stay submerged so the pilots could observe the operation. The answer came from the surface: No. It was too dangerous for Alvin to linger during the lift. The pilots were ordered to surface.
Meanwhile, Red Moody was having his own argument with the captain of the Mizar. Moody worried that the Mizar couldn't hold position directly above the weapon. He suggested that the captain place landing craft, known as Mike boats, on either side
