No answers then, none now.
There were seven of them: Paul, Niel, Diego, Dale, the two Jims and a Harold, most expert outdoorsmen, nervy, athletic tough guys who might one weekend whip down to Mexico to hunt panther and the next be back home to spear a basking shark, dive for lobster or bag some venison in the close-by hills still thick with deer. All were his friends, but three were especially close fishing and hunting buds, and all of them wanted him--more accurately needed him--to come out with them on an underwater photography expedition. He, after all, had the best underwater camera. "You know how much I'd love to come," he said most sincerely, but damn--chained as he was to his day-job desk, a deadline looming--he just couldn't.
Even more aggravating, this was the second time they'd asked (their first try without him and his camera hadn't gone so well), and they really did need him, his expertise. He'd loved the ocean since surf fishing with his father on the Santa Monica beach as a kid, and this outing was exactly his thing, a mix of the great outdoors, some creativity, a little tech--but hell, his damn desk, five mouths to feed, his job. It was a long time ago but not the sort of long time ago that would ever really get old, ever leave him completely. He remembers the summer day, the usual layer of morning fog that inevitably burned off by afternoon--a Southern California sort of summer day--and of course the phone call two days later:
"Mr. Bottoms? Bud Bottoms?"
"Yes."
It was someone from the Santa Barbara Coast Guard station, and it seemed they had, well, a body (one of only two of the seven ever to be recovered). And, really, only half a body, the other half consumed by the opportunistic creatures of the sea.
It's a bit fictive, a movie missing the last reel, because it made no sense then and makes none now. Each man expert at surviving, yet none survived. Four of them had worked for Raytheon, supplier of assorted forms of war-related technologies, and the expedition had had something to do with submarines, and it wasn't surprising that the suggestion of a Russian sub being involved would surface. A less dramatic theory was that the boat, a WWII landing craft perhaps not as stable as it might have been with its clumsy add-on plywood bow, had run over a cable connecting barges operating in the area, but no one really knew and the craft itself was never recovered.
