As we wound past the Sierra Nevada mountains, Laia and I worked on the notebook pages. It was slow going, decoding the message one letter at a time, and it took us a while to recognize that Grandfather had reverted to English, but we eventually ended up with a collection of seemingly unrelated phrases.
moron saboteur
could not stop
the fifth unknown
hid so gorky would not find
must stay hidden
too dangerous
finding would be a larger betrayal
rock fall fourteen
“Does any of this mean anything to you?” Laia asked after we had stared at the phrases for a few kilometers.
“No,” I replied. “It almost seems as if Grandfather is speaking in riddles. What makes the saboteur a moron? Are they stupid because they didn’t do something Grandfather wanted?”
Laia shrugged. “Okay. Let’s write down the question—”
“Or questions,” I interjected.
“—or questions that we have for each phrase.” She turned over the printout and wrote, moron saboteur. Beside it she wrote, Who is the moron saboteur? Why a moron?
“And what did he or she sabotage?” I added.
We went down the list and ended up with:
• moron saboteur—Who is the moron saboteur? Why a moron? What sabotaged?
• could not stop—Stop what? Himself?
• the fifth unknown—Fifth what? What are the four knowns? Or four unknowns?
• hid so gorky wouldn’t find—Hide what? Who or what is gorky?
• must stay hidden—What must stay hidden? Why? From gorky?
• too dangerous—What is too dangerous? The thing that must stay hidden? Gorky?
• finding would be a larger betrayal—A larger betrayal than what? Betrayal of who or what?
• rock fall fourteen—A fall of fourteen rocks? Are there thirteen other rockfalls?
“That’s a lot of questions,” Laia commented when we had finished.
“At least we have a focus now,” I said, trying to sound positive although I thought it was a depressingly long list.
“Several focuses,” Laia said, “and we still don’t know what the ten lines of numbers mean.”
“Let’s look at them again,” I said.
372490
17798
372437
372478
17911
371893
17021
373559
18601
“There does seem to be a pattern in the length of the numbers,” Laia mused. “It’s like one of those puzzles where you have to find the next number in a sequence. I can never do them.”
I had an idea. “Maybe we shouldn’t think of them as ten sequences of numbers. Maybe they’re pairs: 372490/17798, 372437/18120 and so on. That would make five pairs and that might relate to the fifth unknown.”
“Interesting,” Laia said, “but we still don’t know what they mean. 372490 and 17798—are they weights or numbers of…something?”
“Are those the numbers on the pages you showed me in the café?” Felip asked over his shoulder.
“Yes,” Laia and I said at the same time.
“Read them out to me, slowly,” Felip asked.
We had only managed the first four when Felip interrupted. “I know what those are.”
“What?” we shouted from the backseat.
Felip picked his handheld GPS off the dash and tossed it back to us. “Plug them into this,” he said. “Your numbers are locations—latitude and longitude—37 degrees 24 minutes 90 seconds north and 1 degree 77 minutes 98 seconds west.”
“Five locations,” Laia shouted triumphantly. She hunched over the GPS and punched numbers in while I peered at the screen, holding my breath. The machine sat for what seemed an age and then a map appeared with a tiny red cross on it—right beside the village of Palomares.
“It’s in Palomares,” Laia said breathlessly.
The next two locations formed a line right through Palomares. “There must be a mistake,” Laia said when the fourth location showed nothing but a red cross on a blue background. “There’s nothing here.”
“Can you change the scale on this?” I asked. Laia pressed some buttons and a coastline appeared. The red cross was about eight kilometers offshore. “Those must be the locations of the four bombs from the B-52. Three landed around Palomares and the fourth fell in the sea and took months to find. Where’s the last location?”
Once more Laia’s fingers worked. The final red cross was in the hills, a few kilometers inland from Palomares. “The four known and the fifth unknown?” I speculated.
“I’m sure it’s the four known bombs,” Laia said, “but there wasn’t a fifth one. Felip, could there have been a fifth bomb on board the B-52?”
He shook his head. “No. Throughout Chrome Dome, every B-52 carried four bombs, each of which had a specified target inside the Soviet Union if they were ordered to fly in.”
“What if it’s not a complete bomb but the plutonium core from one of the four that broke apart?” I asked.
“It’s possible,” Felip said, but he sounded far from convinced. “The Americans found three bombs in the first twenty-four hours. It would have been obvious if something as large as the plutonium core was missing, and they would have found it. It was the size of a soccer ball, and they searched everywhere—photographs from the time show lines of men in masks, shoulder to shoulder, walking over the landscape. They would have found it.”
“Unless it was hidden,” Laia said. “Hidden so that ‘gorky’ couldn’t find it.”
“Now you’ve been reading too many mystery stories,” Felip said with a laugh. “There weren’t spies running all over the hills like in one of your James Bond movies.”
“You said there was a Soviet spy ship and probably spies on land,” I pointed out. Felip nodded slowly. “And why did the Americans spend such a long time searching around Palomares if they found the first three bombs on the first day and the fourth was underwater?” I asked.
“They wanted to clean up everything,” Felip said, but he didn’t sound quite so certain. “There were many pieces of the two planes that had to be cleaned up as well.”
“But they could have been looking for a fifth bomb,” I said.
“It’s possible, I suppose. But why then did they leave without it?”
“Maybe they took it with them and didn’t tell anyone,” I said. “Maybe they thought someone else had found it, or maybe they just didn’t want more of a fuss. They didn’t want to look even more stupid after it took them so long to find and bring up the fourth bomb. Perhaps they thought if they couldn’t find it, no one could.”
“It’s all a bit of a stretch,” Felip said.
“Okay,” Laia joined in, “but can we go and look while we’re in Palomares? It won’t take long with the GPS.”
Felip sighed. I suspected this wasn’t the first time Laia had talked him into doing something unplanned. “If there’s time,” he said.
Laia turned to look at me, smiled and winked broadly.
“I saw that,” Felip said. I glanced at the rearview mirror. I could tell from Felip’s eyes that he was smiling too.
“So,” Laia said, “the fifth unknown is part of a bomb…”
“Possibly,” Felip said from the front.
Laia grimaced, but she continued, “Possibly, the fifth unknown is part of a bomb. The four knowns are the four known bombs at Palomares.” She waited and looked pointedly at the back of Felip’s head. He said nothing, fixing his eyes on the road ahead.
“The fifth bomb landed in the hills and was hidden from gorky because it was too dangerous.”
“And the bomb was hidden behind the fourteenth rockfall,” I said, worried that we were building too much of our story on speculation. “We’re guessing at an awful lot. And how does the stupid saboteur fit into this?”
Felip laughed. “You think the saboteur was stupid?”
“Yes,” I said indignantly. “That’s what moron means.”
“I know,” Felip agreed, laughter still in his voice, “but Base Aérea de Morón is an American Air Force base outside Seville.” Laia and I stared at her father. “What is more,” Felip went on, “Morón is where the refueling planes left from to meet up with the returning B-52s in 1966.”
“So there was a saboteur—who’s not stupid—at Morón Air Base, planning to bring down a B-52 over Spain in 1966.” Laia was speaking quickly as she continued to build our theory. “He or she succeeds, and four or five bombs fall over Palomares.”
Laia looked at me with a triumphant smile on her face. I couldn’t share her excitement. What if Grandfather was the saboteur? What if he really was a traitor?