Once the map was completed, Craven asked a group of submarine and salvage experts to place Las Vegas-style bets on the probability of each of the different scenarios that might describe the bomb's loss being considered by the search team in Spain. Each scenario left the weapon in a different location.
Then, each possible location was run through a formula that was based on the odds created by the betting round. The locations were then replotted, yards or miles away from where logic and acoustic science alone would place them.
To the uninitiated, all this sounded like the old joke about a man who loses his wallet in a dark alley. Instead of searching the alley, the man chooses to search for his wallet yards away under a street lamp because the light there is better. But as far as Craven was concerned, there was good science behind his apparent madness.
He was relying on Bayes' theorem of subjective probability, an algebraic formula crafted by Thomas Bayes, a mathematician born in 1760. Essentially, the theorem was supposed to quantify the value of the hunch, factor in the knowledge that exists in people beyond their conscious minds.
Craven applied that doctrine to the search. The bomb had been hitched to two parachutes. He took bets on whether both had opened, or one, or none. He went through the same exercise over each possible detail of the crash. His team of mathematicians wrote out possible endings to the crash story and took bets on which ending they believed most. After the betting rounds were over, they used the odds they created to assign probability quotients to several possible locations. Then they mapped those probabilities and came up with the most probable site and several other possible ones.
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 Palo- mares, 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 70degree 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.