Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (13 page)

Without ever having gone to sea, the team now believed they knew where the bomb was. According to their calculations, the most probable site lay far from where the other three bombs had been recovered and far from where most of the plane's debris had lilt the water. Worse, if Craven's calculations were correct, the bomb lay in a deep ravine and was all but unreachable.

The Navy had come across a Spaniard who was reputed to be the very best fisherman in Palomares, Francisco Simo-Orts. Simo Orts claimed to have seen the bomb fall into the water, and he pinpointed its location right over the same ravine. With no other leads, the team in the Med had no choice but to arrange a serious search of the ravine and began contacting the companies that had tried to interest the Navy in their deep-diving submersibles.

The Bureau of Ships agreed to pay to fly two submersibles to Palomares, Reynolds's Alurninaut and Woods Hole's Alvin. After several weeks and no success, President Johnson was furious. He demanded to know where the bomb was, and he demanded to know just when it would be recovered.

In answer, a copy of Craven's latest probability hill-altered to take the weeks of failures into account-was sent to the president.

Johnson blew up at the sight of Craven's curves and graphs. If the search teams couldn't give him instant answers, the president would find scientists who could. He insisted that another group of scientists be hired from Cornell and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They met in an all-day session. In the end they agreed that Craven's plan was the best anyone had.

Johnson didn't have much time to react. For that same day, the crew of the Alvin, on its tenth dive, sighted a parachute enshrouding a cylindrical object. It was 2,550 feet underwater wedged into a 70 degree slope. The Alvin had found the missing H-bomb right where Craven's latest calculations put it. It would take several more weeks to recover the bomb. First the Alvin tried to hook it, but the bomb fell back into the water and was lost for another three weeks. Then the Navy dangled a robot, the cable-controlled underwater recovery vehicle (CURV), from a surface ship. The recovery team almost lost both the CURV and the bomb on April 7, 1966 when the robot failed to hook the bomb and instead became entangled in the parachute attached to the weapon. In desperation, the Navy decided to hoist both the CURV and the bomb up together, hoping the tangle was enough to bring both up to the surface. It was a less than elegant recovery, but it worked. More important to Craven, he had proven his theories. He was certain now that he could work miracles once he had Halibut.

He didn't have long to wait. Halibut was deemed finished just three weeks after the H-bomb recovery.

From the outside, she didn't look much changed. Her already towering sail had been raised to make room for extra masts that held periscopes and antennas to intercept communications to and from Soviet ships that might give chase. Atop her bow there was a small lump anyone could mistake for a misplaced dome of the type used to hold sonar arrays. In truth, that lump was something Craven called a thrust/vector control. It was a gadget he had originally doodled on the back of an envelope, and it allowed water to flow into Halibut's front and out her sides, causing the boat to hover nearly still in the water. Halibut could not only scan the ocean bottom, she could hang over objects, giving the Navy time to study them, perhaps one day giving Halibut divers the opportunity to slip outside of the sub and retrieve.

Inside, Halibut had been sliced, gutted, and given innards unlike any carried by other submarines. That camel-like hump with its gaping hatch had been transformed into a technological cavern now christened the "Bat Cave."

With gray, brown, and sky-blue laminates highlighting the stainless steel of its walls, the cave opened up 28 feet wide, stretched 50 feet long, climbed 30 feet high, and was divided into three levels.

There was a dark room, a data analysis room, and a computer room stuffed with one massive computer: the Univac 1 1 24. It was a huge machine with big tape reels and blinking lights, and it gave the cavern the feel of the science fiction-adventure realm for which it was named. (Still, Univac had only a tiny fraction of the power of the average modern laptop.) Crammed everywhere else were hunks, enough for a team of sixteen submariners and spooks.

Craven's crowning achievement was Halibut's "fish," which he hoped would swim through the deepest deep. Weighing two tons each, and spanning 12 feet long, these aluminum creatures had cameras with battery-powered strobe lights for eyes, whiskers of towed sonar arrays, and rudders and bow planes for fins. Designed to be towed from the bottom of the Bat Cave on several miles of cable, they had been spawned by Westinghouse Electric Corporation for $5 million each.

As Craven and company prepared the final round of tests on Halibut, he was meeting with his intelligence contacts almost daily in special soundproof rooms. He made a game of juggling his myriad other projects, all the while keeping the clearance-deprived within the Navy completely in the dark. There were cover stories within cover stories as he was called upon to solve various problems of the deep. There were the continuing demands from Rickover, as well as concern from Congress about why his deep-submergence projects were spending tens of millions of dollars more than anticipated. The overruns were, of course, being sunk into Halibut. But the project was one of the most highly classified in the Navy, and Craven could no more disclose those costs than he could his own whereabouts when he was on the sub.

Other programs became his casualties as he spread Halibut's costs in bogus budget items throughout the Navy. One poor captain was ordered to stash Halibut expenses in the accountings of a missile-warhead program, then faced weekly meetings at which he had to find some way to explain why his team was so badly overspending its budget. Another of Craven's favorite hiding places was the DSRV program. There was a certain poetry to this, since Craven was working on a fake DSRV that would one day be welded down to the back of Halibut to serve as a decompression chamber for divers. By the time Craven was done, the DSRV program had gone 2,000 percent over budget.

The sum so appalled Senator William Proxmire that the Wisconsin Democrat gave the project his "Golden Fleece Award." The DSRV, he declared, had one of the worst budget records in U.S. history. The Navy was horrified at the public dressing-down. Craven was elated. How many pirates get handed a cover story written by a senator?

Of course, Rickover eventually found out what Halibut was doing. He pushed until he knew most of the details. When he was refused by intelligence directors, he went straight to the admirals in charge of submarine operations. He would not accept that there were operations using his submarines that would take place without him. The admirals didn't dare turn him away. But intelligence officers bristled at his interference. For one thing, Rickover refused to sign the standard secrecy oaths, believing that his loyalty should be taken for granted.

Halibut's officers did little to make the job of appeasing the admiral any easier. When one of Rickover's inspectors sought to keep the submarine docked over concerns about the way the crew was handling the boat's reactor, Halibut's skipper, Commander Harold S. "Hank" Clay, refused to bow to Rickover's authority. Halibut operated under the highest priority code in the military, and the way the story was told on board Halibut, Clay barked at Rickover's man, "You want to fail me, fail me. You tell the president I can't get under way. This boat has Brick-Bat 01 authority."

Clay had enough problems without Rickover's interference. Halibut's test runs weren't going well. None of the spy equipment had been built to any of the normal military specifications. The military had, in fact, never devised a set of specs for anything that would operate 20,000 feet down. And so, by trial and error, mostly error, Halibut's crew tried their best to make all of her space-age equipment function. In these early days, the crew was becoming convinced that gremlins had moved into the Bat Cave. There were never-ending computer problems. The computer's "Interleaf" operating system needed more than the computer's 32 kilobytes of memory to operate. When computer components in the fish failed, new ones were secreted into Pearl Harbor in the luggage of American Airlines stewardesses.

Then there was the rest of Halibut's deep-sea equipment. Her crew was discovering that systems that functioned fine at a few hundred feet underwater just didn't work the same way 15,000 feet deep, where pressures were enough to crush any slight flaw or weakness into a full-scale failure. The tiny, gold-plated rubber connectors used in the fish's wiring failed at 10,000 feet when the gold and the wire began to compress at different rates, sending the gold flaking off and breaking the circuits.

The strobe lights, so carefully designed to ride the fish and light the sea floor, worked too well. They were so bright that they blinded the cameras. Ultimately, dimmer lights were built. Unfortunately, the video signal failed to survive the climb through the coaxial cable that toted the fish, one at a time. So on Halibut's early missions, the crew would have to make do with grainy sonar images of shadows, bright spots, and shapes. The crew would be able to grab hold of clearer photographs only once every six days, when a massive fish was hoisted back aboard, carrying its film to the surface.

"If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly," Craven kept repeating, trying to ease the pain of failure. Meanwhile, he met weekly with the fish designers at the Westinghouse plant in Maryland, hoping to trade his tales of disasters for solutions.

"Okay, fellas, we are going to have a wire brushing, but I want you all to smile," he started each meeting, commanding grins at times, grimaces at others.

One day the engineers decided to answer his greeting in kind. They handed Craven a clear plastic box. Inside was a wire brush. His name was stenciled on the back of the brush which lay next to a small plate engraved with one word: "SMILE."

On one of the last runs to test the fish, a surface ship was supposed to drop an object into the ocean. The idea was for the fish to he employed in a scavenger hunt. Halibut's crew would have to identify the object, which would be hidden from periscope view by a huge box. The box would open from the bottom and drop the object unseen into the depths.

The day came, the weather was good. Halibut and the surface ship set out to sea. A crane on the ship lifted the box and lowered it until it barely dangled above water. Then the box opened from the bottom. Moments later, the bad news came over the ship-to-sub radio: the object that the Navy had taken such pains to hide was floating.

The crew on the surface ship hauled the object back aboard and began wrapping it in canvas and heavy anchor chains, lots of them. They threw it back overboard. Soon after, the Naval Investigative Service sprang into action, sending officers on board to force promises of confidentiality from all the men on the surface ship, who now knew exactly what their secret cargo was. Judging from the size of the box and the investigators' reactions, the secret object was probably designed to resemble a missile's nose cone.

For the next few days, Halibut searched. Somewhere along the line, a control rod got stuck at the bottom of Halibut's reactor chamber, shutting it down and forcing the boat to resort to diesel engines. Then one of the camera-toting fish was lost, joining all of the high-tech, sensitive trash it had been designed to find. Craven had expected some sort of fish disaster. He had ordered six of the contraptions, although Halibut was designed to carry only two at a time. As far as he was concerned, they had just dropped a spare-a very expensive spare.

Finally, the other fish was lowered and captured the images the men had been seeking. Later, and with some glee, the special projects crew proudly paraded a photograph of the object of their search around the boat.

Craven had just logged a major success, the first indication that Halibut might actually be able to accomplish all she had been rebuilt for. But Halibut's men couldn't see that. Most of the photograph had been blacked out for security reasons. As far as the men of the sub were concerned, they had just pulled off a massive search for nothing more than a lump of tangled anchor chain.

   Halibut's one success left Craven convinced that she was ready to start filling the Sand Dollar wish list. And over at Naval Intelligence, nobody was more anxious to believe him than Navy Captain James F. Bradley Jr.

Bradley, forty-six years old, had just taken over as the Navy's top underwater spy, and now he was meeting with Craven regularly in his unmarked, soundproofed suite on the fifth floor of the E Ring of the Pentagon. Three sets of locked doors barred trespassers. Guarding the entrance was a receptionist armed with a well-practiced look of confusion and a standard answer to unwanted inquiries. She always said that she knew nothing of Bradley or of his staff. His official Navy biography listed his assignment simply as "Naval Operations, Navy Department"-no specifics, nothing more.

Nothing in the public record suggested that Bradley had a hand in crafting intelligence missions for every attack submarine in the nation's fleet. And nothing suggested that he now was responsible for crafting Halibut's first real missions.

Bradley and Craven knew they weren't going to be able to keep taking money from other Navy departments to support Halibut indefinitely, not without very high-level backing. Rickover was already gunning for them, in part because their submarine, considered a "special projects boat," was one of the few nukes he had trouble controlling. They needed results, and they needed them fast if their deep-sea search idea was going to survive.