Just before Mass began, Tatiana noticed the parents of Slava Milachevsky, the pilot, arrive at the church. Slava’s wife, Yelena, was not with them, but they stood through the Mass together, and placed lit candles to mark their prayers.
Friday, 5 August
SS + 26 h 30 mins
Commander Riches was already half awake when the radio came on at seven. The thin curtains were ineffective armour against the morning sunlight. He opened his eyes, winced, and closed them again. The newsreader was far too chirpy. Right now all he could think of was the remaining day of drudgery before the weekend.
He’d only been half listening when the voice on the radio announced that a Russian submarine was trapped underwater off the country’s Far Eastern coast. He was instantly awake, but there were few other details. She said there were seven people on board, from which he assumed it must be a scientific research submersible, not a full-size military submarine. Still, it was worth finding out more. It wasn’t every day that the undersea world made the national headlines.
He swung his legs out of bed, and paused. The Command mobile phone was sitting on his bedside table. It being August, the operational head of the Submarine Rescue Service, Commander Jonty Powis, was away on holiday, leaving Riches in charge. He stared at the phone for a second. It was supposed to be a key node in a classified international network that instantly came alive in any submarine emergency. It was silent.
The gears in his brain began to turn. Russia’s east coast was about as far away as possible. He could think of at least three rescue teams that were better placed to get there than his. But he knew how commanders think, and top brass wouldn’t let this chance go. They’d want to use this as an exercise and a test of his team’s preparedness. It wasn’t as though he’d actually be deploying either the UK’s rescue submersible or the underwater robot, but he’d have to go through all the motions.
He needed coffee.
Friday, 5 August
SS + 26 h 30 mins
Captain Jon Holloway entered the secure zone in the British Embassy’s Chancery section, where all the more sensitive, political matters were discussed. Holloway had been one of the nuclear engineers on board the vessel during Riches’ submarine command ‘Perisher’ trial, and the two men were familiar with one another. He now walked into the meeting room and eased into his chair, laying his file on the table. All the surfaces were the same, light-coloured softwood, a design that was reaching for Cool Britannia rather than old world authority, he guessed. The Defence Attaché, the sturdy Air Commodore Wils Metcalfe, walked into the room and bade good morning to Holloway and the Military Attaché, Colonel Pat Callan, and nodded towards the assistant attachés. Uniforms weren’t worn in the embassy, and all the men were in shirts and ties, having left their jackets at their desks on this bright summer morning.
Metcalfe sat back in his chair to listen to updates that he would afterwards be presenting to the Ambassador. One by one the attachés from the three forces gave their briefings, but all knew what the main item would be today. They’d all read the same newswire reports. Filling only half the seats around the rectangular meeting table, the group listened to Captain Holloway’s outline of the situation. Usually there were two or three stories of relevance at the morning briefing, reports of activities and key events that they’d plucked from the morning papers – shifts in the military hierarchy, budget cuts, that sort of thing. Today was different.
Holloway could add little to the original Interfax report beyond updating them on the two calls he’d managed to make so far. The first was to the Duty Fleet Controller at the Northwood HQ. They’d been tipped off about the incident through another channel, but were also finding more detailed information hard to come by. The second call had been to the Russian Main Naval Staff, but his contact had been tight-lipped, and had stonewalled him. He’d not been able to get any further before coming to the meeting.
Eyes were narrowed and chins were being stroked. If the UK could somehow assist, there was potential in the situation to aid relations between Moscow and London. Although in relatively good condition at the time, the UK was determined to preserve its coveted Special Relationship with the US, whose encounters with Russia were becoming increasingly strained. Russia stood accused of exporting nuclear fuel to Iran, as well as of supporting the anti-US forces in Syria by selling them missiles. Staying close to the US meant pushing Russia away.
But to a greater degree the problems between Moscow and London were direct. For the past four years, the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky had been using the UK as a base from which to attack President Vladimir Putin. Berezovsky, maths genius and a businessman accused by his critics as being the epitome of ‘robber capitalism’, had helped put Putin in power in March 2000 using the television station he owned, ORT. But, once elected, Putin had thanked him by trying to wrest the station back into state hands. The new president didn’t want such power in the hands of others, and used the people’s dislike of the oligarchs – who stood accused of stripping the nation’s wealth for their own gain – as an excuse. The two men became bitter enemies.
Then, in August of that same year, the Kursk disaster unfolded, and Berezovsky used ORT to unleash harsh criticism of Putin. Soon he began to fear for his life. He fled to the UK, where he was granted political asylum, and joined the ever widening ‘London Circle’ of Russian exiles. Three times the Russian authorities tried to extradite him on charges of fraud and political corruption, and three times the British refused. There were rumours of assassination attempts. None of this was good for diplomatic relations.
The Naval Cooperation Programme still linked the two nations, one of the fibres preventing the slide towards another Cold War. It had been set up with the aim of trying to bring the Russian Federation close enough to start participating in joint international operations. With a working relationship and regular contact between the two forces, it would become easier to defuse tensions, and harder for misunderstandings to arise and ferment.
Cooperation on submarine rescue had been a major element in the programme. Just two months ago, Russian observers had joined the NATO submarine rescue exercise in the Mediterranean. Navies from around the world came together every three years, usually in either the Mediterranean or the Baltic, to practise rescuing sailors from each other’s submarines. That year, the UK’s system had plucked crewmen from Italian, Dutch and Greek submarines that were playing dead on the seabed. The training would prepare them to act instinctively when the Naval ‘SUBSUNK’ signal was received, indicating that a submarine was down.
It was an awesome show of military technological wizardry, deployed for saving rather than ending human lives. The only letdown was the naming protocol. While US exercises came up with pulp fiction titles like ‘Cobra Gold’ or ‘Valiant Shield’, this one from NATO’s naming protocol sounded like a cheap, watery dessert: Sorbet Royal.